Bundling EC2 Instances and EBS
Wednesday, September 24th, 2008As I mentioned in the last post, I’m working on hosting email accounts on Amazon EC2. I am experimenting with mounting /var on an EBS volume so my database, logs, etc. will survive the failure of an instance. The idea is to be able to start a new instance, attach the EBS volume containing the /var partition, and keep going where the previous instance left off.
The first time I tried to bundle the volume I noticed it was taking a very long time. I had incorrectly assumed that ec2-bundle-vol would automatically exclude any EBS volumes. Instead, it only excludes a static list of directories, so I had to add the EBS volume (/mail) to the exclusion list.