Guide to Resizing EC2 Instance Volume without Deleting the Instance

As engineers or developers who use AWS Cloud infrastructure, when we provision an EC2 instance, we often face the challenge of the instance storage getting exhausted while our deployment is midway.

While starting out my career with AWS Cloud a couple of years ago, whenever I'm faced with this challenge, I find myself deleting the instance and provisioning a new instance with a higher volume size.

Over the years, I found that I wasn't implementing the best practice. Rather, I was only meant to create a shell script that will increase the volume size to a size of my choice while restarting the instance to ensure that the partition takes up all the space it can.

The script explained in part:

A. Specify the desired volume size in GiB as a command line argument. If not specified, default to 20 GiB.

SIZE=${1:-20}

B. Get the ID of the environment host Amazon EC2 instance.

INSTANCEID=$(curl http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/instance-id)
REGION=$(curl -s http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/placement/availability-zone | sed 's/\(.*\)[a-z]/\1/')

C. Get the ID of the Amazon EBS volume associated with the instance.

VOLUMEID=$(aws ec2 describe-instances \
  --instance-id $INSTANCEID \
  --query "Reservations[0].Instances[0].BlockDeviceMappings[0].Ebs.VolumeId" \
  --output text \
  --region $REGION)

D. Resize the EBS volume.

aws ec2 modify-volume --volume-id $VOLUMEID --size $SIZE

E. Wait for the resize to finish.

while [ \
  "$(aws ec2 describe-volumes-modifications \
    --volume-id $VOLUMEID \
    --filters Name=modification-state,Values="optimizing","completed" \
    --query "length(VolumesModifications)"\
    --output text)" != "1" ]; do
sleep 1
done

F. Check if we're on an NVMe filesystem

if [[ -e "/dev/xvda" && $(readlink -f /dev/xvda) = "/dev/xvda" ]]
then
  # Rewrite the partition table to take up all the space it can.
  sudo growpart /dev/xvda 1

  # Expand the size of the file system.
  # Check if we're on AL2
  STR=$(cat /etc/os-release)
  SUB="VERSION_ID=\"2\""
  if [[ "$STR" == *"$SUB"* ]]
  then
    sudo xfs_growfs -d /
  else
    sudo resize2fs /dev/xvda1
  fi

else
  # Rewrite the partition table to take up all the space it can.
  sudo growpart /dev/nvme0n1 1

  # Expand the size of the file system.
  # Check if we're on AL2
  STR=$(cat /etc/os-release)
  SUB="VERSION_ID=\"2\""
  if [[ "$STR" == *"$SUB"* ]]
  then
    sudo xfs_growfs -d /
  else
    sudo resize2fs /dev/nvme0n1p1
  fi
fi

The complete script is below:

#!/bin/bash

# Specify the desired volume size in GiB as a command line argument. If not specified, default to 20 GiB.
SIZE=${1:-20}

# Get the ID of the environment host Amazon EC2 instance.
INSTANCEID=$(curl http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/instance-id)
REGION=$(curl -s http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/placement/availability-zone | sed 's/\(.*\)[a-z]/\1/')

# Get the ID of the Amazon EBS volume associated with the instance.
VOLUMEID=$(aws ec2 describe-instances \
  --instance-id $INSTANCEID \
  --query "Reservations[0].Instances[0].BlockDeviceMappings[0].Ebs.VolumeId" \
  --output text \
  --region $REGION)

# Resize the EBS volume.
aws ec2 modify-volume --volume-id $VOLUMEID --size $SIZE

# Wait for the resize to finish.
while [ \
  "$(aws ec2 describe-volumes-modifications \
    --volume-id $VOLUMEID \
    --filters Name=modification-state,Values="optimizing","completed" \
    --query "length(VolumesModifications)"\
    --output text)" != "1" ]; do
sleep 1
done

#Check if we're on an NVMe filesystem
if [[ -e "/dev/xvda" && $(readlink -f /dev/xvda) = "/dev/xvda" ]]
then
  # Rewrite the partition table to take up all the space it can.
  sudo growpart /dev/xvda 1

  # Expand the size of the file system.
  # Check if we're on AL2
  STR=$(cat /etc/os-release)
  SUB="VERSION_ID=\"2\""
  if [[ "$STR" == *"$SUB"* ]]
  then
    sudo xfs_growfs -d /
  else
    sudo resize2fs /dev/xvda1
  fi

else
  # Rewrite the partition table to take up all the space it can.
  sudo growpart /dev/nvme0n1 1

  # Expand the size of the file system.
  # Check if we're on AL2
  STR=$(cat /etc/os-release)
  SUB="VERSION_ID=\"2\""
  if [[ "$STR" == *"$SUB"* ]]
  then
    sudo xfs_growfs -d /
  else
    sudo resize2fs /dev/nvme0n1p1
  fi
fi

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