Dynamically add temporary large parition, then remove it

Question

On an AWS EC2 instance I have a large (10's of GiB) Solr index that I would like to backup daily. In order to do so, I need an additional 200 GiB of storage space, for the span of about 6 minutes (replicate, tarball, then FTP elsewhere and rm the new directory and tarball).

Is there any way to request a 200 GiB EBS volume, then mount it, then unmount it and remove it from our account, all from a BASH script or Python script? Would a different approach (i.e. not EBS) be better?

Mike Brant Mike Brant · Accepted Answer · 2013-02-22T17:11:25

Yes, it is possible to provision and mount an EBS volume via script or using various SDK's.

Here are the instructions for using the command line tools to creating an EBS volume:

http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/ebs-creating-volume.html

And here are the instructions for using the command line tools to attach a volume.

http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/ebs-attaching-volume.html

Finally, here are the instruction to delete the volume once done with it:

http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/ebs-deleting-volume.html

In all cases just scroll down to the "Command Line Tools" section.

Dynamically add temporary large parition, then remove it

1 Answers