SSH into GCP, AWS, and Azure VMs

Cloud inventory goes stale the moment you bookmark it

Teams keep EC2 and GCE hosts in notes, SSH config stubs, or GUI session lists. Instances get replaced. Private IPs change. Bastion paths evolve. The bookmark stays wrong.

Provider consoles can open a session, but they do not organize the fleet the way a terminal-first engineer actually works.

Provider CLIs in, OpenSSH out

Bast sync pulls VMs through gcloud, AWS CLI v2, or Azure CLI. Synced hosts are read-only reflections of cloud inventory. When sync runs again, the list updates instead of rotting.

Connecting still uses your system ssh binary and the same config patterns you already know, including tunnels and identity handling documented per provider.

Import a cloud account

1. Authenticate the provider CLI on your machine (gcloud, aws, or az).
2. Run bast sync gcp, bast sync aws, or bast sync azure (or use the Sync tab in the TUI).
3. Open Bast, find the imported hosts, and connect. Start with the GCP, AWS, or Azure guide for filters and networking notes.

Keep cloud credentials out of your SSH client

Bast does not ask you to paste cloud API keys into a proprietary host database. It uses the CLIs you already trust for cloud auth, then writes local SSH config for the resulting hosts.