Add and prepare a Volume to an EC2 Instance

Well this is simple and will document it just for fun! =)


You can attach a volume to an EC2 instance by:

1. creating the volume at EC2 - > Volumes -> Create volume

Select the size and create it. It is IMPORTANT that the volume is created in the same Geography and lab, i.e. If an instance is un us-east-1a and your volume is in us-east-1b you will not be able to attach the volume; use us-east-1a for both for example.


Once it is created

2. Right click on the volume -> Attach Volume

Then select the instance you want to attach to.

See that volume state will be attaching for a while; in my case I did it when the instance was running, I guess this also works for stopped instances.

Ok, so now we have to format, mount and att to fstab our new device:


ssh your EC2 instance.

If our Volume is named: /dev/xvdf and we want to use an ext4 filesystem:

sudo mkfs.ext4 /dev/xvdf

Then mount to a particular directory

mkdir /mnt_large

sudo mount /dev/xvdf /mnt_large

Finally add to fstab:


Follow is the original content:

LABEL=cloudimg-rootfs   /        ext4   defaults        0 0
/dev/xvdb       /mnt    auto    defaults,nobootwait,comment=cloudconfig 0       2

Add your device line and final result will be:

LABEL=cloudimg-rootfs   /        ext4   defaults        0 0
/dev/xvdb       /mnt    auto    defaults,nobootwait,comment=cloudconfig 0       2

/dev/xvdf       /mnt_large    auto    defaults,nobootwait,comment=cloudconfig 0       2

For details on fstab see: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Fstab


Why do we add it to fstab? well if you reboot you can make sure that your device will be automatically mounted.

That's it!

P.D. I should say that there are not ugly flags.