I haven't done this in AWS yet, but I've been growing mounted block devices/disks Google Cloud for a while now. It's more or less just like growing a disk on a SAN.<p>You still have to grow the filesystem it self though, so if you're trying to grow the root mount, using a partitioned disk, and not using an abstraction like LVM you will need to reboot to be able to use the full disk.<p>Glad to see AWS catch up in this area.
Finally, I presume this lets us resize EBS volumes without having to do things like this: <a href="https://matt.berther.io/2015/02/03/how-to-resize-aws-ec2-ebs-volumes/" rel="nofollow">https://matt.berther.io/2015/02/03/how-to-resize-aws-ec2-ebs...</a>
Let's say I have an EBS volume of 500GB with 300GB of data. What happens if I mistakenly resize the EBS volume to 200GB? Do I get an error message or does part of my data get wiped out?
Tried this just now. Spun up 8GB ec2+ebs instance. Booted and logged in as root. Deleted the root partition using fdisk, carefully recreated it from the same starting sector but to new 100GB capacity (check lsblk output to confirm). Then resize2fs /dev/xvda1 my ext4 FS. All online, hot. Obviously it's risky, but you can take a snapshot of the EBS before starting. Seems very nice for the common use case of slowly growing storage needs that are best served by a simple disk.
As usual, Jeff Barr's blog post is much more informative than the announcement.<p><a href="https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-ebs-update-new-elastic-volumes-change-everything/" rel="nofollow">https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-ebs-update-new-elast...</a>
I've been procrastinating on moving our app to aws because this was not supported, I was going to have to rewrite some horrible code to support using s3 for scaling (EFS is not in the new Canada region). This should save me a few hundred hours!
So can I change to spinners at night with low I/O to save on daytime costs with higher SSD IOPs? "Automate" with lambda seems like it begging for cost optimization as well.
We went with EFS for our RethinkDB instances on EC2. Was set up as a big data store, so read latency wasn't really an issue. Works well.<p>But that was before this announcement...nice addition AWS EBS team!