Most of the answers given here do not explain the details for the most basic usage.

After you have setup a server (in this case a linux server) in the cloud, you connect to it using ssh from the terminal.

From your computer, add the private key dyson-ubuntu-vm.pem which is given to you by your cloud services provider such as Azure, AWS etc to your .ssh configuration on your local machine like this:

Copy the .pem file to the /home/ssenyonjo/.ssh folder, then open /home/ssenyonjo/.ssh/config file and add the following entry:

Host 20.85.213.44
  HostName 20.85.213.44
  User Dyson
  IdentityFile /home/ssenyonjo/.ssh/dyson-ubuntu-vm.pem
  IdentitiesOnly yes

Now from your terminal, access the cloud linux server like so:

ssh [email protected]

When that works, create a git project on the cloud server like so:

[email protected]:~/projects$ git init --bare s2

Now come back to your local machine and clone that empty repository like so:

[email protected]:~/Projects/mastering-git$ git clone ssh://[email protected]/home/Dyson/projects/s2

If you see an error that looks something like: fatal: Could not read from remote repository, It means you’re accessing the wrong folder. Ensure you have outlined the right path from the root to the created repository.

If you dont want to setup a config file but want to access the ssh server that requires a key, you can use below command:

GIT_SSH_COMMAND='ssh -i ~/Projects/aws/keys/aws_ubuntu.pem'  git clone ssh://[email protected]/home/ubuntu/projects/mastering-git/rand 

You can export the command to continue using it for other tasks like git push and git pull

export GIT_SSH_COMMAND='ssh -i ~/Projects/aws/keys/aws_ubuntu.pem'

See: https://stackoverflow.com/a/29754018/10030693