100 Days Of Cloud (Azure) Day 24: Securing Virtual Machine SSH Access

Can someone assist with this.

I created the VM and SSH key, I was successful with a ssh connection from the azure-client to the newly created vm.

**SSH access to 'devops-vm' failed.**
**ssh -i ~/.ssh/devops-vm_key.pem azureuser@20.66.23.156**

continue connecting (yes/no/[fingerprint])? yes Warning: Permanently added '20.66.23.156' (ECDSA) to the list of known hosts. Welcome to Ubuntu 24.04.3 LTS (GNU/Linux 6.14.0-1017-azure x86_64)
    • Documentation:  https://help.ubuntu.com
    • Management:     https://landscape.canonical.com
    • Support:        https://ubuntu.com/pro
System information as of Mon Mar  9 14:38:41 UTC 2026
System load:  0.08              Processes:             111 Usage of /:   5.6% of 28.02GB   Users logged in:       0 Memory usage: 29%               IPv4 address for eth0: 10.0.0.4 Swap usage:   0%
Expanded Security Maintenance for Applications is not enabled.
0 updates can be applied immediately.
Enable ESM Apps to receive additional future security updates. See https://ubuntu.com/esm or run: sudo pro status
The list of available updates is more than a week old. To check for new updates run: sudo apt update
The programs included with the Ubuntu system are free software; the exact distribution terms for each program are described in the individual files in /usr/share/doc/*/copyright.
Ubuntu comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by applicable law.
To run a command as administrator (user "root"), use "sudo ". See "man sudo_root" for details.
**azureuser@devops-vm:~$**

Could you please try this again?
This time, create the ssh keys with default names: id_rsa and id_rsa.pub, and use the public key to create an SSH key for the VM.
You can refer to this solution.

Santosh, thanks for the speedy response and suggestion.
I was able to complete the lab successfully.

Cheer