EC2- Booting from an EBS snapshot and then detaching the volume to reduce costs

Question

I would like to boot from an EBS snapshot for convenience but then I would like to detach the volume after launch so I don't have to pay for it.

Is this possible?

Rosebud

Answer 1

No, it's not possible. The EBS volume is the system partition so it the same as pulling the harddrive out of the server.

To reduce costs you could try to minimize the size of the volume so it has just enough space to hold all the system files and your data.

Polyvinyl

Can I resize it dynamically? There are some nodes that don't need that much disk and I can reduce them quite a bit. I'm also going to reduce logging as I think this will cost me. – Rosebud