How to Resize the Root Partition on AWS Linux Instances

In the fast-paced world of cloud computing, the ability to dynamically adjust resources to meet the evolving needs of applications is crucial. “Expanding Your Horizons: How to Resize the Root Partition on AWS Linux Instances” serves as an indispensable guide for AWS users seeking to harness the power of flexibility and scalability. This comprehensive tutorial delves into the innovative capabilities of AWS Elastic Volumes, a game-changing feature that allows for the modification of volume attributes in real time, without impacting application performance.

Designed for developers, system administrators, and IT professionals, this guide illuminates the path towards seamless storage management. Whether you’re looking to expand the root partition to accommodate growing data needs or optimize performance by adjusting volume types, this article offers step-by-step instructions to achieve your goals without downtime. From understanding the basics of volume resizing to executing changes with minimal disruption, “Expanding Your Horizons” equips you with the knowledge to make informed decisions and efficiently manage your AWS storage infrastructure. Prepare to embark on a journey that will elevate your AWS skills and ensure your applications continue to thrive in the ever-changing landscape of cloud computing.

Resize EBS Volumes in EC2 Linux Instances

The AWS elastic volumes allow online resizing of the volumes without any downtime of your applications. This is very useful for production applications. Here is the step-by-step tutorial to resize the EBS volume on the EC2 instance and grow the partition size.

1. I have a running ec2 instance with Ubuntu Linux. Login to the EC2 dashboard in the AWS account and identify your instance.

   

2. That was initially launched with 12 GB of EBS volume attached to the EC2 instance. As the application data size grows now, we need to increase the disk space.

   

3. Check the size of the EBS volume partition attached to the root file system.
   

   

4. Go to the EC2 dashboard and right-click on the EBS volume attached to your instance. Click Modify Volume:
   

   

5. A dialog box will appear in the browser.Set a new size for your EBS volume and click Modify
   

   

6. The volume will now begin the resize and optimization process, which you can see on the console. This will take a couple of minutes to complete ebs resize process. You will see a message in the volume state column:

   

7. Wait until the volume state column change to “in-use” with green color.

   

8. Login to your instance and type “lsblk” command to view attached volumes and disk partitions. You may find that the volume size is increased but the partition mounted on the root (/) file system is still the same.

   

9. Use the “growpart” command to resize the root partition up to the free available volume. This command takes two parameters, first if the volume name, and second is the partition number.

   

   
   Now you can see the partition size is also increased with the “lsblk” command.

10. Now, you need to resize the partition manually from the command line. Before this, identify the type of filesystem on that partition with the following command:
    

    

11. Finally, resize the partition based on the filesystem. In my case, the partition was formatted with Ext4. So I used the “resize2fs” command to resize it.

    

    
    If the partition is formatted with the XFS file system, then use “xfs_growfs -d /” command to perform this operation.

12. All done!

Wrap Up

The new AWS elastic volumes allow online resizing, which is very helpful for production environments. You can quickly increase the disk size of your instances without any downtime. In this tutorial, you have learned about resizing ebs volume on ec2 Linux instances.

In this guide, we have provides you steps to quickly resize the volume on an EC2 Linux instance.