# (Recommended) Creating a Key Pair on the Management Console

#### Scenarios

You can use the management console to create a key pair. ECS stores the public key and you store the private key.

#### Procedure

1. Log in to the management console.
2. Click in the upper left corner and select your region and project.
3. Under Computing, click Elastic Cloud Server.
4. In the navigation pane on the left, choose Key Pair.
5. On the Key Pair Service page, click Create Key Pair.
6. Enter a key pair name and click OK.

   The default key pair name consists of KeyPair- and four random characters in the "KeyPair-xxxx" format. Change it to an easy-to-remember one, for example, KeyPair-xxxx_ecs.

7. Manually or automatically download a .pem private key file with the name that you specify as the key name. Store it in a secure place and click OK.

   This is the only chance for you to save the private key file. Keep it secure. You'll need to provide the key pair name when you create an ECS, and the corresponding private key each time you connect to the ECS through SSH.

Parent topic: Key Pairs