Create and Attach EBS Volumes

Overview

EBS volumes are block level storage devices that can attach to instances. You can use these volumes similar to how you would use a physical hard drive. EBS volumes must be in the same availability zone of the EC2 instance it attaches to.

In this lab, we'll create an EBS volume & attach it to an EC2 instance. We'll then detach it from the EC2 instance and connect it to another EC2 instance.

Creating the EBS Volume

From EC2 go to Volumes -> Create Volume
Give the volume a size - 8 GiB
Select the availabiliy zone this EBS Volume will reside in - us-west-2a
Create the volume

Attaching to EC2 Instances

We have 3 instances: Lab-1, Lab-2, and Lab-3
Lab-1 and Lab-2 are in availability zone 2a & Lab-3 is in availability zone 2b

We'll first attach the EBS Volume to Lab-1
Navigate to the EBS volume and select Attach volume
Select an instance to attach the volume to
Notice that Lab-3 is not listed because it is not running in the same availability zone as the EBS volume

Verify EBS Volume is Attached

SSH into the Lab-1 Instance
Use lsblk command to list disks available on the EC2 instance
The attached EBS volume is /dev/xvdf which contains no partitions

Using the EBS Volume

Documentation for making EBS volumes available for use here

New volumes are raw block devices and need a file system before we can mount and use them

Format the EBS volume as xfs by running sudo mkfs -t xfs /dev/xvdf
Mount the volume

Create a directory with
```
sudo mkdir /data
```
Mount with
```
sudo mount /dev/xvdf /data
```

Go into /data and create some files

Moving EBS Volume

Go into the EBS Volume and select Detach volume
We'll now reattach the volume to Lab-2
Inside Lab-2 we can run lsblk to see our attached volumes
Create a mount point with sudo mkdir /data and mount the volume
Inside our Lab-2 instance we see that the files we made when the EBS volume was attached to Lab-1 have carried over