Walk-Through: Upsizing EBS Volumes

Increasing the size of EBS volumes is much easier than decreasing their size. Officially, AWS does not provide a supported way to decrease an EBS volume apart from creating a smaller volume and copying everything over. This process increases dramatically in difficulty for a root volume.

As such, it is recommended to always start small, because growing EBS storage is fairly easy. In this walk-through, we will go over two methods to increase EBS storage on an instance that is filling up with Docker containers and volumes.

The first method is relatively simple, but the second method is more scalable and can help save money over time, as we'll see later.

Method one: Expand the volume

We begin with an instance that we provisioned with 8 GB root volume. We've since installed Docker, downloaded several images, and spun up some containers. However, we're running out of space on our root volume.