procedure for increasing the root disk size of an EC2 instance

Last night, I used this procedure, written by Eric Hammond, to increase the boot disk size on the instance used to support the nrhdb. It requires use of the Amazon EC2 command line tools, working from another computer (i.e., a computer other than the server that's being resized).

I only had to make a couple of modifications to use it:

• When running the ec2-run-instances command: because I wanted to start the instance in a specific availability zone and apply the desired firewall settings, I added two parameters not included in the procedure: --availability-zone and --group (this reference document provides more info)
  

• My initial attempt to run the resize2fs command did not resize the disk in the OS; I had to reboot the server, and at that point, resize2fs ran successfully

Summary: This procedure describes how to increase the size of the root disk on an EC2 server with very little downtime.