The Truth About Rightsizing EBS Volumes: Cut AWS Costs Without Downtime

The current era is witnessing a massive surge in data storage, where an enormous volume of information is being accumulated and preserved at an unprecedented scale. As a result, the demand for scalable, efficient, and inexpensive storage solutions is on the rise. Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers a range of storage services that can meet the needs of businesses of all sizes. However, managing storage resources can be challenging, especially when dealing with fluctuating workloads.

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Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) is a block-level storage service designed for use with Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). It provides highly available, scalable, and reliable storage for Amazon EC2 instances. Amazon EBS volumes are highly flexible and can be easily attached or detached from Amazon EC2 instances.

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Rightsizing EBS volumes is crucial for optimizing performance and reducing costs in AWS. When EBS volumes are too small, they can become a bottleneck and cause downtime, whereas oversized volumes result in wasted resources and higher costs.

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AWS offers a range of tools that can help automate many of the tasks involved in resizing the EBS storage. AWS published a blog post discussing how to automate Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volume resizing using AWS Step Functions and AWS Systems Manager.

The blog post provides detailed instructions on how to scale up your EBS volumes and I highly recommend checking it out. While the solution presented in the blog post can be useful for automating the process of expanding EBS volumes and optimizing performance, it is crucial to consider downsizing the volume to avoid cost escalation resulting solely from volume expansion. 

It is important to consider several factors associated with expanding or shrinking an EBS volume in AWS.

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“ Expanding EBS volumes is an essential capability for avoiding downtime risks, shrinking them is equally crucial for cost optimization and avoiding inflated volumes.”

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Expanding an AWS EBS volume requires careful consideration of several factors: 

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• Increased Costs -  Expanding an EBS volume leads to increased costs, as AWS charges for the size of the EBS volume provisioned, regardless of the amount of data stored on it. Therefore, it is important to consider the actual storage requirements before increasing the EBS volume size. Any unused capacity will inflate the costs, and thus, puts additional importance on capacity planning.

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• Performance Impact - Expanding an EBS volume can result in performance issues of the EC2 instance to which it is attached if the instance does not have sufficient resources to handle the increased I/O load. It is important to ensure that the EC2 instance has adequate CPU, memory, and network resources to handle the increased I/O load.

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• Time constraint - When it comes to modifying an EBS volume, Amazon imposes restrictions with a cool-down period. This requires you to wait for a minimum of six hours and verify that the volume is either in use or available before attempting any further modifications on the same volume. This can become a significant barrier considering the downtime risks in a production environment.

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On the other hand, shrinking an EBS volume without downtime is not possible as of today. You can manually create a new smaller-sized EBS volume and move the data from the existing volume to the newly created volume.

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Challenges with the manual shrinking process involve the below factors: 

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• Size constraint - Shrinking an EBS volume requires that the amount of data stored on the volume is less than the new size of the volume. If the amount of data stored on the volume is greater than the new size of the volume, the shrink operation will fail.

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• Downtime - Shrinking and EBS volume require stopping the instance for some time, which can lead to downtime for the application running on the instance. In some cases, this downtime may not be acceptable, especially in production environments, leading to financial and reputational losses.

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• Increased Wait time - It requires a longer time to resize larger volumes. Resizing larger EBS volumes can take longer than smaller volumes, which can lead to increased downtime and longer wait times for users.

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Wondering if there is a solution that could take away all these challenges and make life easier with EBS resizing?

We have the right platform to make this possible.

Introducing Lucidity Auto-Scaler - Our industry-first Auto-Scaler solution can monitor disk utilization and automatically resize EBS volumes as needed. It can dynamically expand and shrink EBS volumes based on disk utilization, optimizing resource allocation and cost-efficiency in AWS. By doing so, it ensures a healthy disk utilization of 75-80% so that your applications have the necessary resources to function effectively while potentially reducing costs by up to 70%. . By focusing on automated shrinking without downtime, businesses can save significant costs on storage resources and improve operational efficiency.

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Check out the magic here: https://www.lucidity.cloud/product
Need a demo? Just hit Request demo and our team will showcase the solution for you.

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Frequently Asked Questions: Rightsizing EBS Volumes on AWS

1. What does “rightsizing EBS volumes” mean?

Rightsizing EBS volumes refers to adjusting the size of your Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) volumes to better match your workload needs—avoiding both underprovisioning (which can cause performance issues) and overprovisioning (which leads to wasted spend).

2. Can I shrink EBS volumes in AWS natively?

Not directly. AWS does not currently support shrinking EBS volumes in place. To downsize, you must:

• Create a new, smaller volume
• Migrate the data
• Detach and replace the old volume
  This process involves manual steps and downtime—which is where automated tools like Lucidity’s Auto-Scaler come in.

3. Does AWS offer automatic EBS rightsizing?

AWS provides automation for expanding EBS volumes using services like AWS Step Functions and Systems Manager. However, it does not support automatic shrinking, which means cost optimization is incomplete without manual intervention or third-party tools.

4. What are the risks of not rightsizing EBS volumes?

Failing to rightsize EBS volumes can lead to:

• High costs from unused storage
• Performance issues if volumes are underprovisioned
• Operational inefficiencies due to lack of visibility and control

5. How does Lucidity Auto-Scaler help with EBS rightsizing?

Lucidity Auto-Scaler automatically monitors disk utilization and:

• Expands volumes when needed to prevent app crashes
• Shrinks volumes automatically (without downtime) to reduce waste
• Keeps utilization within a healthy range (typically 75–80%)
  This allows teams to save up to 70% on storage while maintaining performance.

6. Will resizing my EBS volume affect running EC2 instances?

Expanding volumes can be done without downtime, but shrinking usually requires detaching or replacing the volume—causing downtime. Lucidity’s Auto-Scaler solves this by shrinking volumes behind the scenes with no disruption to running workloads.

7. How do I get started with EBS rightsizing automation?

You can:

• Review your current EBS volume utilization using AWS Cost Explorer or CloudWatch
• Set up thresholds for expansion/shrinking
  Or you can use Lucidity’s Auto-Scaler to automate the entire process. Request a demo to see it in action.