[Cidan]

I haven't done this in AWS yet, but I've been growing mounted block devices/disks Google Cloud for a while now. It's more or less just like growing a disk on a SAN.

You still have to grow the filesystem it self though, so if you're trying to grow the root mount, using a partitioned disk, and not using an abstraction like LVM you will need to reboot to be able to use the full disk.

Glad to see AWS catch up in this area.

[brazzledazzle]

I wonder if Linux can mimic the technique Microsoft uses to grow volumes and filesystems on the fly. It's something I've missed on the occasion. It's pretty slick.

[maccam94]

A number of Linux filesystems support online resize. See this handy chart: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_file_systems#Res...

[Nux]

All my VMs have a separate /boot and ext4 as / (xfs would work, too).

With this setup - using KVM, mind you - I can change the disk size of the VM and resize the / filesystem inside by just using resize2fs, no need to reboot, umount or anything else.

[brazzledazzle]

The impression I got a long time ago was that it's potentially unsafe. Is that old information?

[Nux]

I have not read that anywhere, I did it many times without data loss or other issues. You just need to use a relatively recent distro (Centos 6 +).

If you use xfs, watch out, you can grow a fs, but not shrink it - which is why I use ext4 when I want more flexibility.

[Rapzid]

It depends on the filesystem but yes, it can.