Eventhough AWS is a great cloud computing service , it does have it’s own disadvantages . We are not going to discuss all of them here but we will look into one of them . If you have launched EC2 instances from Amazon Machine Images ( AMI ) , you might have seen that the size of the root partition ( / ) is only 10GB for all the instances . So to test if we can have more than 10GB for root partition , we tried the following
1 ) We decided to create a Custom AMI of our local system using Loopback file .
2 ) For this , we created a Loopback file of size 50GB .
3 ) But when we tried to Bundle the image , we got the following error
[bash]ERROR : The specified image file LoopBackFileName.img is too large[/bash]
4 ) When we tried again with a smaller Loopback image file of size 15Gb , we got the same error .
So currently for EC2 instances , we cant resize the preconfigured 10GB limit for Root Partition ( / partition ) . But there are few workarounds for this limitation .
1 ) If you want to install anything on Root partition , then you can install it on a directory under / and move the installation directory to an EBS volume and create a softlink on / to the installation directory in EBS .
2 ) Aws has introduced a new feature called “Boot From EBS” which will allow you to have upto 1TB for Root Partition . Please check our blog on BootFromEBS to find out how to resize the root partition in an EC2 instance. Basically we can have more than 10GB for the root partition by this method.