After you review your configuration and click "Launch" a popup will come up asking you for a key pair. It's important for you to understand what it's asking for. It is the same type of SSH key pair that you've created and used in the [[OPS245 Lab 7]]. Remember that your private key is yours, it's private to you, and not for anyone else to see. AWS is asking you to give them the public key which is the pair of the private key which you wish to use to log in to your new VM. In this case your private key is the effective equivalent of the root password.

Yes, that means AWS generated your private key and theoreticaly they could keep it, but they promise that they don't and that's almost certainly true. Once you donwload the private key and click "Launch Instances" - the only way to log into your new virtual machine is using the private key you saved. AWS does not provide the equivalent option of "reset your password" for instances that were already created.