Lab Information
The Nautilus DevOps Team has recently been informed by the Development Team that their EC2 instance is running out of storage space. This instance, crucial for development activities, is named xfusion-ec2 and currently has an attached volume of 8 GiB. To accommodate the increasing data requirements, the storage needs to be expanded to 12 GiB. This change should ensure that the expanded space is immediately available for use within the instance without disrupting ongoing activities.
Identify Volume: Find the volume attached to the xfusion-ec2 instance.
Expand Volume: Increase the volume size from 8 GiB to 12 GiB.
Reflect Changes: Ensure the root (/) partition within the instance reflects the expanded size from 8 GiB to 12 GiB.
SSH Access: Use the key pair located at /root/xfusion-keypair.pem on the aws-client host to SSH into the EC2 instance.
Lab Solutions
Step 1: Identify the volume attached to xfusion-ec2
From the aws-client host:
aws ec2 describe-instances \
--filters "Name=tag:Name,Values=xfusion-ec2" \
--query "Reservations[].Instances[].BlockDeviceMappings[].Ebs.VolumeId" \
--output text
✔ This returns a volume ID like:
vol-057ed3f876c222e27
Step 2: Expand the EBS volume (8 GiB → 12 GiB)
aws ec2 modify-volume \
--volume-id vol-057ed3f876c222e27 \
--size 12
Verify modification state
aws ec2 describe-volumes-modifications \
--volume-ids vol-057ed3f876c222e27
Wait until:
"Progress": "100"
✅ At this point, AWS has expanded the disk
❌ The OS does NOT see the new space yet
Step 3: SSH into the EC2 instance
From aws-client:
ssh -i /root/xfusion-keypair.pem ec2-user@<PUBLIC_IP>
Step 4: Verify current disk size (inside EC2)
lsblk
You will see:
NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINTS
xvda 202:0 0 12G 0 disk
├─xvda1 202:1 0 8G 0 part /
├─xvda127 259:0 0 1M 0 part
└─xvda128 259:1 0 10M 0 part /boot/efi
This is expected.
Step 5: Expand the root partition
Identify root disk
Usually one of these:
/dev/xvda
/dev/nvme0n1
# Grow the partition
sudo growpart /dev/xvda 1
# Since this is Amazon Linux, the root filesystem is XFS.
sudo xfs_growfs /
Step 7: Verify final result ✅
df -h /
Expected output:
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use%
/dev/xvda1 12G ...
✔ Root partition now reflects 12 GiB
✔ No reboot required
✔ No downtime
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