How do I increase the EBS volume size of a running instance?

I have a server running the recent Ubuntu AMIs from Canonical. The size of the EBS boot volume is 8GB. I know that I can resize EBS volumes by taking a snapshot, creating a new volume and expanding the partition on it. How can I increase the size of the volume while the machine is running? If this is not possible, what is the preferred method for increasing the boot volume size with minimal downtime?

We can increase the volume size with the new EBS Feature Elastic volumes, post that we need to follow the following steps to use the increase size as shown here

Assume your volume was 16G and you increased it to 32GB.

    $lsblk
NAME    MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
xvda    202:0    0  32G  0 disk
└─xvda1 202:1    0  16G  0 part /

To extend xvda1 from 16GB t0 32GB, we need growpart. growpart is available as part of cloudutils

sudo apt install cloud-utils

Post installation of cloud-utils, execute the growpart command

sudo growpart /dev/xvda 1
 

Now lsblk, will show

    $ lsblk
NAME    MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
xvda    202:0    0  32G  0 disk
└─xvda1 202:1    0  32G  0 part /

but df -h will show only 16GB

Final command for extending xvda1 to 32GB is

sudo resize2fs /dev/xvda1

In case of XFS file system,

sudo xfs_growfs /dev/xvda1 Thanks egg

Unfortunately it is not possible to increase the size of an Amazon EBS root device storage volume while the Amazon EC2 instance is running - Eric Hammond has written a detailed (I'm inclined to say the 'canonical' ;) article about Resizing the Root Disk on a Running EBS Boot EC2 Instance:

> As long as you are ok with a little down time on the EC2 instance (few > minutes), it is possible to change out the root EBS volume with a > larger copy, without needing to start a new instance.

If you properly prepare the steps he describes (I highly recommend to test them with a throw away EC2 instance first to get acquainted with the procedure), you should be able to finish the process with a few minutes downtime only indeed.

Good luck!

A late answer to this 5-year-old question

AWS has just announced a new EBS feature called Elastic Volumes, which allows you to increase volume size, adjust performance, or change the volume type while the volume is in use.

You can read more about it on AWS Blog here.

You just need to create its snapshot first and from that snapshot need to create another volume and once new volume ready, detach the old volume from the instance and attach the new volume. Make sure to stop the instance before start this process and restart the instance once its done.

Refer http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/ebs-expand-volume.html

This will work for xfs file system just run this command xfs_growfs /

I found that when trying to increase the root partition /dev/sda1 which was being reported as /dev/xvda1 on centos6 i couldn't unmount the volume in order to expand the partition.

I got around this by mounting my original volume as /dev/sda1 and my snapshot as /dev/sdb. I then restarted the image and resized the /dev/sdb1 partition using parted.

Once the partition /dev/sdb1 was resized i detached both volumes and reattached the new volume to /dev/sda1 and ran resize2fs /dev/xvda1.

You cannot do this. But if your more focused on downtime then cost, you maybe able to clone your main instance, mount a larger EBS storage device to your system, copy the data over and then redirect traffic to your new instance.

If you want, a method I use lately use S3 has a medium of backups and deployment to other systems. So for example, you have your existing system running..set a script to upload your data to s3 every N minutes/hours/days..then write a script to use when launching new instances to download that data. If your data isn't something like constantly updated then this should work fine(for me, I use this to distribute updated version of my codebase while the data itself is managed on a ec2 database server).

Hope that helps.