Resize AWS EC2 EBS drives on the fly with zero downtime

Running out of hard drive space is a bane of every system administrator. Shutting down the server to add another drive then relaunching, or maybe you are lucky enough to have hot swappable hard drives making the process less painful. Well in the cloud on Amazon AWS you no longer need to shutdown or reimage your instance to expand your hard drives. If you are already using EBS backed instances, you now have the ability to modify your volumes on the fly.

This is how you resize your EBS drives on the fly on a EC2 instance. If you are using instance storage you cannot do this obviously, it only works on EBS backed instances.
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Easily increase the size of your Ubuntu EBS boot volume with only console

So you have run out of space on your EBS boot volume on Amazon’s EC2 and you do not know what to do? I will walk you through the steps you need to follow in order to easily increase the size of the default Ubuntu EBS boot drives (/dev/sda1) using just the Amazon webservices console. There is no need to use the ec2 command line tools, and you will only need to run one little command on the remote server when complete.




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