[ec2-beta] Understanding Disk/Partitions Distribution in ami-18d73071

[Eric Hammond]

Luis:

EC2 instances are limited to 10GB on the root (/) partition.

There is about 150 GB free under /mnt on small instances.  Large and
extra large instances have a lot more space, most of which is not even
formatted or mounted.

For more information see:

  http://ec2types.notlong.com
  http://ec2storage.notlong.com

This local storage is called "ephemeral storage" by Amazon and it
disappears when the instance is terminated or fails.

As Rodney points out, for persistent storage that lives beyond the life
of an EC2 instance, you will want to investigate Elastic Block Store (EBS):

  http://ec2ebs.notlong.com

--
Eric Hammond
ehammond at thinksome.com



Luis Ibanez wrote:
> First of all,
> Thanks a lot for making these Ubuntu image available.
> 
> This is great !.
> 
> 
> --
> 
> Background:
> 
> I'm using the ami-18d73071 in oder to setup a machine
> for testing Nightly builds of one of our open source
> packages (www.itk.org).
> 
> My first try was to download the source code to the
> "/home/ubuntu" directory, and to try to build it right
> there.
> 
> However, it turned out that the size of the "/" directory
> is rather small.
> 
> Here is what I see with "df"
> 
> Filesystem           1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
> /dev/sda1              1548144    839580    629924  58% /
> tmpfs                  3681752         0   3681752   0% /lib/init/rw
> varrun                 3681752        68   3681684   1% /var/run
> varlock                3681752         0   3681752   0% /var/lock
> udev                   3681752      2516   3679236   1% /dev
> tmpfs                  3681752         0   3681752   0% /dev/shm
> /dev/sdb             433455904    840800 410596800   1% /mnt
> 
> so the "/" partition was full before finishing
> building half of the package.
> 
> 
> ---
> 
> My question is then:
> 
>     What will be the recommended location in the file system
>     of the instance where I could put a source+binary tree
>     that may reach the 3 to 4 Gigabytes ?
> 
> 
> ---
> 
> Should I think that these files should rather go into a storage
> bucket and that I should mounted and unmounted every time that
> I launch the instance ?
> 
> 
> 
>    Thanks for any advice,
> 
> 
>       Luis
> 
> 
>