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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