Attaching and Mounting EBS Volume to EC2 Instance

Create

• Create new EBS Volume in the correct Availability Zone
• Attach new EBS Volume to EC2 Instance

Mount

• Check filesystem type (ext4) sudo file -s /dev/xvd*
• Find new disk sudo fdisk -l
• Create filesystem sudo mkfs -t ext4 /dev/xvdf
• Mount new fs sudo mount /dev/xvdf1 /mnt/vol -t ext4
• Move/Bind
  sudo mount --bind /mnt/vol /home/user/vol available in both
  sudo mount --move /mnt/vol /home/user/vol available in moved
• Confirm: df -h

Quick Automatic Mount At Boot

EBS Devices become unmounted again when the EC2 Instance reboots.
Append to the file /etc/rc.local the mount command used:
sudo mount /dev/xvdf1 /vol -t ext4 above exit 0

Stable UUID Automatic Mount At Boot

• Find UUID for device: ls -al /dev/disk/by-uuid/
• Create backup of fstab: cp /etc/fstab /etc/fstab.orig
• Add entry to fstab: sudo vim /etc/fstab  UUID=de9a1ccd-a2dd-44f1-8be8-0123456abcdef /mnt/data-01 ext4 defaults,nofail 0 2
• Check mount errors by mounting all filesystems in /etc/fstab: sudo mount -a

Warm up a new snapshot EBS volume ("lazily")

• sudo dd if=/dev/xvdx of=/dev/null bs=1M
• http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/ebs-initialize.html

Tips

Install the ebsmount package and create a hidden directory on the EBS volume and configure the system to automount using udev when the EBS volume is attached to the EC2 instance.

Practice

• Databases mount to /var/data
• Web files /srv