InvalidKeyPair.NotFound EC2 Boto package

It is fair to say that I have been acquainted with Amazon AWS for the past couple of years for my research requirements. Actually it is more than fair - it has been my bread-and-butter environment for scripting experiments on cloud platforms and wide-area storage networks.  And boto has been my go-to api for AWS tasks given that most of my experiments evolve from ad-hoc python scripts that does a bit of this and that.

And yesterday, I started receiving "InvalidKeyPair" response exception from the API out of the blue (not entirely true since I had made a host of changes to my scripts), which suggested that my keypair doesn't exist. A simple ls said otherwise - I found the keypair well and truly alive with the right set of permissions as well.

Source:

EC2Connection.run_instances(image_id='ami-09b11233', key_name='awskeys.pem', instance_type='m1.small',security_groups='default'])

Exception:

boto.exception.EC2ResponseError: EC2ResponseError: 400 Bad Request
InvalidKeyPair.NotFound. The key pair 'awskeys.pem' does not exist

After almost running out of hair to pull and Googl'ing all abstract keywords, here is the solution:

EC2Connection.run_instances(image_id='ami-09b11233', key_name='awskeys', instance_type='m1.small',security_groups='default'])


Apparently, the key is just "awskeys" and not "awskeys.pem". I haven't yet figured out why this exception wasn't raised until now or performed a trace-back to see when this started becoming an issue, but wanted to make a note right away just in case this is useful to someone else too.

Issued in public interest to all AWS dependent developers. May you always hit the right price for your spot  instances. Amen !

~Titan.