Managing EBS volumes can be tricky, especially when it comes to resizing them automatically. I've come across three options: Datafy, ZestyDisk, and Lucidity. It seems like most of the time, the traditional methods involve copying data to smaller volumes, but I'm curious if there are better solutions out there.
I understand that solutions like FSxN offer deduplication and thin provisioning, but I'm not looking to go down that path. It feels like there are plenty of strategies for compute management, but not enough for storage management, so I thought I'd ask for your thoughts!
4 Answers
Shrinking EBS volumes can be a hassle. Most teams tend to overprovision them to avoid issues or use snapshots to recreate smaller volumes during maintenance windows. I'd suggest testing how those automation tools handle rollback scenarios and sudden I/O spikes to ensure reliability. Interestingly, I've discovered that significant savings often come from identifying dev/test instances that run 24/7 unnecessarily. Scaling them down during off-hours has proven to be more beneficial than just aggressively resizing storage.
If your app can handle it, consider AWS Storage Gateway as an option. It uses S3 as its backend and can present SMB or NFS shares. By setting it up, you only incur costs for the Storage Gateway appliance plus any caching EBS volume, alongside S3 costs, which are based on usage. This might end up being cheaper than EBS, especially if your application doesn't require high-speed access.
EBS is pretty affordable. Just allocate what you need and increment slowly as required. If you find you need to shrink volumes, it’s best just to copy your data to a new, smaller volume and swap them around. Unfortunately, there's no straightforward way to decrease the size of a volume directly.
It really depends on what you're trying to achieve. Changing EBS sizes isn't a primary goal—there's likely another underlying issue you're trying to solve. If you need to resize EBS online, I'd recommend using LVM. You can add EBS physical volumes to a volume group as needed, then use 'pvmove' to relocate data before detaching the old volume.
Honestly, the time it takes to ask this question and even more to engage with a vendor may not justify the cost. In my experience, the need to scale down storage comes up very rarely; I can count those situations on one hand.