Deleting a key

Over time, you may want to delete a key pair for any number of reasons. When you delete a key pair from the EC2 Management Console, you are no longer able to use that key pair for any new EC2 instances. However, this deletion simply only deletes the copy of the public key that AWS holds; it does not delete the public keys that are attached and associated to any EC2 instances that are already created with it. Therefore, as long as you have the private key to the same pair, you can still connect to that same EC2 instance.