It’s rare for me to blog about AWS considering I am mainly GCP focused, but this stumped me enough to the point I think it can be of use.

Let’s start

AWS doesn’t allow you to shrink an EBS volume, so our only way to do it is to create a new volume, move everything over then remap it.

Getting started

We will assume:

  1. An instance running us us-east-1e
  2. 300GB EBS volume named old
  3. We want to create a new one of 100gb (we will call it new-vol)

We need to shut down the instance to prevent issues and inconsistencies.

I suggest snapshotting the old volume before doing any work. This is just a CYA precaution! (Remember to delete it later to save costs)

  • Install ncdu on the instance (This is just to see the current size of all the files)

  • Change directory to / and run sudo ncdu

  • Create the new volume

  • Choose the region you wish to deploy it to

  • Choose the size and the type

  • Add the relevant tags

  • name : new-vol

Creating the new VOL

  • Shutdown the instance (sudo shutdown on the instance)
  • Right-click the new Volume
  • Click Attach Volume
  • Choose the instance either by Name or ID (I prefer ID)

Now we need to start the instance and format the Volume

  • Check if the volume has got data on it (Can never be too sure)

  • sudo file -s /dev/xvdf

  • It should return /dev/xvdf: data

  • If it does not, stop and re-assess the situation

  • Format the volume

  • sudo mkfs -t ext4 /dev/xvdf

Mount the new volume to the instance

  • Create the directory to mount the disk to

  • mkdir /mnt/new-vol

  • sudo mount /dev/xvdf /mnt/new-vol

Copy data to new Volume

rsync -axv / /mnt/new-vol/

This will take a while, so get on with some other work

Once the copy has finished

  • Instal grub on the new volume

  • grub-install --root-directory=/mnt/new-volume --force /dev/xvdf

  • (centos 7+) grub2-install --root-directory=/mnt/new-volume --force /dev/xvdf

  • Unmount the directory

  • sudo umount /mnt/new-vol

  • Check the UUID using blkid (make note of this, we need it below)

  • tune2fs -U <uuid from ^> /dev/xvdf

  • Check the volume lable from the old volume using sudo e2label /dev/xvda1 : Should return something like cloudimg-rootfs

  • Replace the volume label with the old value with e2label /dev/xvdf cloudimg-rootfs

Shutdown the instance

sudo shutdown

Detach the old volume and the new volume from the AWS EC2 console

Attach the new volume (Best to do it by UUID of the EC2 Instance) to /dev/sda1

Start the EC2 instance and SSH

Closing notes

Your milage may vary, we are assuming that you have adequate linux experience

I take no responsibility to any damage caused to your instances during this process, you knew the risks by doing this in prod, you take the fall for it. Learn from it and don’t do it in prod again