Remote Login Fails After Configuring an Amazon Linux 2 AMI Instance to be FIPS Compliant/Certified

Aloha,

My goal is to have an EC2 instance in gov-cloud that is FIPS compliant to support a RHEL8 FIPS compliant container. I performed the following steps when creating and configuring the EC2 Instance.

1. Created a new instance (Launch Instances button from EC2 Dashboard)
2. Selected Amazon Linux 2 AMI (HVM) - Kernel 5.10, SSD Volume Type [64-bit (x86)]
3. Selected t2.mirco
4. Default "Configure Instance Details"
5. Storage size changed to 20 GiB - the rest of the settings were default
6. Configured the "Name" tag to be my project name
7. Default security group to allow SSH connections via TCP on port 22
8. Launched and downloaded the *.pem file
9. Connected to the machine as ec2-user using my personal machine's terminal via SSH and the *.pem file (login successful)
10. Performed the following commands:
11. sudo yum update -y
12. sudo yum install -y dracut-fips
13. sudo dracut -f
14. sudo /sbin/grubby --update-kernel=ALL --args="fips=1"
15. sudo reboot

I allowed sufficient time for the system to reboot and attempted to login. I was met with the following message: Permission denied (publickey,gssapi-keyex,gssapi-with-mic). I tried all methods available to connect to the instance and all methods failed. I have since terminated the instance.

My questions:

1. Does it matter if the system is a dedicated host, dedicated instance, or shared instance when creating a FIPS compliant instance in gov-cloud?
2. Has anyone been successful in doing this? If so, what steps did you use or tutorial did you follow?
3. Any pointers or recommended solutions outside of using Amazon Linux 2?

Thanks in advance, Craig