How to extend AWS EBS volumes with no downtime



If you need to extend your EBS volume With No Downtime, please follow these simple steps:


  • Login to your AWS console
  • Choose “EC2” from the services list
  • Click on “Volumes” under ELASTIC BLOCK STORE menu.
  • Choose the volume that you want to resize, right click on it and click “Modify Volume”


Set the new size for your EBS volume (in this case i have extended an 8GB volume to 50GB)


  • Click on modify.


Now, we need to extend the partition itself.



  • SSH to the EC2 instance where the EBS volume is attached.
  • Type the following command to list our block devices:


[root@awsserver ~]# lsblk
NAME    MAJ:MIN RM  SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
xvda    202:0    0   50G  0 disk
└─xvda1 202:1    0    8G  0 part /


  • As you can See root Device is showing 50GB but the partition is showing 8GB. Now Grow the partition.


[root@awsserver ~]#  growpart /dev/xvda 1
CHANGED: partition=1 start=2048 old: size=16775168 end=16777216 new: size=104855519,end=104857567


  • We have a XFS filesystem so ran , xfs_growfs


[root@awsserver ~]#  xfs_growfs /
meta-data=/dev/xvda1             isize=512    agcount=4, agsize=524224 blks
         =                       sectsz=512   attr=2, projid32bit=1
         =                       crc=1        finobt=0 spinodes=0
data     =                       bsize=4096   blocks=2096896, imaxpct=25
         =                       sunit=0      swidth=0 blks
naming   =version 2              bsize=4096   ascii-ci=0 ftype=1
log      =internal               bsize=4096   blocks=2560, version=2
         =                       sectsz=512   sunit=0 blks, lazy-count=1
realtime =none                   extsz=4096   blocks=0, rtextents=0
data blocks changed from 2096896 to 13106939
[root@awsserver ~]#


  • Now Check the File System Size :

[centos@awsserver ~]$ df -h /
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/xvda1       50G   12G   39G  23% /
[centos@awsserver ~]$


You have just extended your EBS volume size.