Managing SSH keys between EC2 instances

I have what seems to be a growing count of EC2 instances and all is running fine and dandy. The one problem I'm facing, however, is figuring out a strategy for SSHing between the machines. Copying over my private key to each instance is counter productive, and it works fine when I need to SSH in from my personal machine, but not when I need to SSH from machine to machine.

What are some decent strategies to tackle this problem? How are you SSHing in between your cluster of EC2 instances?

Solution 1:

You use ssh-agent:

ssh-agent
ssh-add
ssh -A remote-machine

For easier use, add

Host remote-machine
ForwardAgent yes

to your ~/.ssh/config