Lab-016

Moving an EBS Volume Between EC2 Instances

Difficulty Level: 1

Creation Date: June 26, 2020

Original Author(s): Thyago Mota

Contributor(s):

Goal

The goal of this lab is to illustrate how to move an EBS volume from one EC2 instance to another.

Architecture Diagram

Overview

Step 1 - Create an EBS Volume

During the Add Storage step of Launch Instance, add a new EBS volume.

Step 2 - Mount EBS Volume

Connect to the EC2 instance via ssh and run lsblk to learn your EBS device's name. For example, the output I got from lsblk was:

NAME    MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
xvda    202:0    0   8G  0 disk
└─xvda1 202:1    0   8G  0 part /
xvdb    202:16   0   8G  0 disk

The device /dev/xvda is the boot volume, mounted at the root level. The device /dev/xvdb must be the EBS volume that we created. Run the following commands to format and mount the disk:

sudo mkfs.ext4 /dev/xvdb
mkdir data
sudo mount /dev/xvdb data

Then use the following commands to create some files in your new disk:

sudo touch data/test1.txt
sudo touch data/test2.txt
sudo touch data/test3.txt

Step 3 - Terminate the EC2 Instance

This step illustrates the fact that when you terminate an EC2 instance, non-boot volumes are not deleted by default. Go to Elastic Block Store - Volumes and verify that your EBS volume is still available even after the EC2 instance is terminated.

Step 4 - Attach EBS Volume

Launch a new EC2 instance but this time do not create a new EBS volume. Instead, after your instance is launched, attach the EBS volume created earlier to the EC2 instance.

Test and Validation

Connect to the new EC2 instance, mount the EBS volume and see if you can access the files created earlier.