Please read the Kops SSH docs:
When using the default images, the SSH username will be admin, and the SSH private key is be the private key corresponding to the public key in kops get secrets --type sshpublickey admin. When creating a new cluster, the SSH public key can be specified with the --ssh-public-key option, and it defaults to ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub.
So to answer your questions:
- Yes, you can set the key using
--ssh-public-key
- When
--ssh-public-key
is not specified Kops does not autogenerate a key, but rather uses the key found in ~.ssh/id_rsa.pub