How can I just increase the size of my root disk on AWS EC2 for use with Elastic Beanstalk

Question

On deployment, I copy datafiles from S3 to my root drive to be used by Tomcat application. The problem is, root disk is only 8GB and my datafiles will soon be larger than that. I want to increase the size of the root disk a little without moving to a more expensive EC2instance. Right now using m3.medium.

I cannot modify an already running instance by manually adding another disk. I'm using EB load balanced so instances may come and go to meet demand. So, how do I increase the size of root disk?

Answer 1

This can be done using the following ebextension snippet.

Resources:
    AWSEBAutoScalingLaunchConfiguration:
        Type: AWS::AutoScaling::LaunchConfiguration
        Properties:
            BlockDeviceMappings:
               - DeviceName: /dev/sda1
                 Ebs:
                     VolumeSize:
                        15

Add this snippet to your app source in a file at path .ebextensions/01-change-root-volume-size.config. You can name the file whatever you want but it should be in the .ebextensionsdirectory and should have a suffix of .config.

Update your environment with this new app source. This will terminate your current instance and start a new one with the size you want.