The goal of this lab is to illustrate how to move an EBS volume from one EC2 instance to another.

 

Architecture Diagram

Overview

Step 1 - Create an EBS Volume

During the Add Storage step of Launch Instance, add a new EBS volume.

 

Step 2 - Mount EBS Volume

Connect to the EC2 instance via ssh and run lsblk to learn your EBS device's name. For example, the output I got from lsblk was:

NAME    MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
xvda    202:0    0   8G  0 disk
└─xvda1 202:1    0   8G  0 part /
xvdb    202:16   0   8G  0 disk

The device /dev/xvda is the boot volume, mounted at the root level. The device /dev/xvdb must be the EBS volume that we created. Run the following commands to format and mount the disk:

sudo mkfs.ext4 /dev/xvdb
mkdir data
sudo mount /dev/xvdb data

Then use the following commands to create some files in your new disk:

sudo touch data/test1.txt
sudo touch data/test2.txt
sudo touch data/test3.txt

Step 3 - Terminate the EC2 Instance

This step illustrates the fact that when you terminate an EC2 instance, non-boot volumes are not deleted by default. Go to Elastic Block Store - Volumes and verify that your EBS volume is still available even after the EC2 instance is terminated.

Step 4 - Attach EBS Volume

Launch a new EC2 instance but this time do not create a new EBS volume. Instead, after your instance is launched, attach the EBS volume created earlier to the EC2 instance.