What happens when I change the instance type from t2 micro to t3a.xlarge?

Question

We have my staging environment set up on the Linux machine with type t2 micro. Now we are trying to ramp up the instance but worried about the dependencies and the file structure which is present on the machine.

What happens when we change the instance type?

Does it have a new EBS attached to it( 1gb will be switched by 16gb)?

OR

Does it add to the already existing EBS volume (1gb + 16gb)?

Answer 1

Whenever you update the instance type it will perform the following process:

• Shutdown the instance
• Update the instance type (if its possible, some are incompatible).
• Restart the instance.

Any EBS volumes will persist this process, but if you have a local volume such as NVMe or instance store this disk will be replaced with another local disk on the new hardware.

I believe what you're referring too isn't the EBS volume storage it is the memory (RAM) that is available to the instance. If you wanted to increase the amount of storage you would instead need to increase the EBS size.