Motivation
AWS offers Elastic Block Storage (EBS) as hard drives for EC2 instances. One of our EC2 instance used a 40GB EBS volume which cost us about $4 per month, but we are only using 5.5GB of that 40GB, so I have been thinking of reducing size of storage to save cost, however, unlike the convenience AWS gives you when expanding storage size, it is totally a different animal if you try to reduce EC2 storage size. $4 a month is not big deal, but given prospect of our rapid growth in future, despite the technical challenge and unavailability of its know-how, I felt it's necessary to take on this challenge and solve it.
Fire: Following Wrong Tutorials
As one of the tutorial mentioned, It turned out to be a 6* hour gruesome effort luckily with a happy ending. But before the happy ending, like the theme of this blog, this effort of exploration started a fire as I followed these steps:
- google search keyword "reduce EBS volume size"
- following steps of 2 tutorials at top of Google search results but failed after about 4 hours of effort
Fire Drill: Find and Follow Correct Tutorials
Now after spending the previous 4 hours walking the wrong path, I recollected the reason for failure being the fact that EBS volume I tried to shrink size being system boot drive, while the tutorials I followed did not address this particular characteristic, therefore I adjusted google search term and did the following
- googled again by adding some keyword related to boot or startup and found another tutorial which looks better than previous two
- following the tutorial and achieved goal
Lesson Learned
For a technical issue with multiple online tutorials each offer a different solution, Google's ranking of search results (these online tutorials) is not a reliable metric to measure quality and reliability of these tutorials.
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