I’ve SSH’d Into EC2 Dozens of Times. This One Still Took 4 Hours!

#server #aws #cloud #devops

Yesterday, I spent FOUR hours trying to SSH into an EC2 instance. 4 HOURS. I’ve done this dozens of times before, This wasn’t my first time. Tried from both my macOS and windows terminal maybe it was a local system issue. Nothing worked

What am I writing about this?
I knew the drill.
I checked the “obvious” things first
I didn’t skip the basics:

Security group? ✅ Port 22 open
Source IP? ✅ Correct
Instance running? ✅
Public IP? ✅
My .pem key and permissions? All In check.

On paper everything was right. And yet… no access. Typical case of When experience doesn’t save you from overwhelm. This is the part people don’t talk about enough. Even when you know what you’re doing:

different environments behave differently
muscle memory fails when the context changes
small details you normally gloss over suddenly matter.

I wasn’t confused because I didn’t understand EC2. I was overwhelmed because too many variables were in play at once.
At some point, I wasn’t debugging anymore — I was context-switching:

shell differences
key permissions
command syntax
AWS quirks

Individually trivial. Collectively exhausting. The mistake wasn’t ignorance — it was friction Nothing was fundamentally broken. There was no dramatic misconfiguration. when I say “friction” in this context, I’m talking about anything that slows down your thinking, disrupts your flow or makes an otherwise straightforward task mentally heavier.

That’s how you lose hours on something you “already know.” When it finally worked When I eventually got in, the solution felt almost embarrassing in its simplicity. Not because I missed something obvious — but because clarity only comes after calm. The system failed in a predictable but poorly observable way.

Once the noise dropped, everything lined up.

Next time, this same setup will take minutes.

The real lesson
This experience reinforced something important: