Deleting EBS Volumes While Snapshotting

I’ve been working with AWS quite heavily recently. A lot of the time, I find myself thinking, “I wonder what happens if I do this…”

Sometimes, I can find the answer in Amazon’s fairly extensive documentation library. But sometimes, I want to perform events in a certain order where the consequences aren’t described clearly.

For example, “What happens if I delete an EBS volume while a snapshot operation is taking place?”. Advice that I could find implied that snapshots were asynchronous operations and that volumes were safe to use after the snapshot was initiated (incurring a performance penalty, of course). However, nothing was said about deletions.

I tested it out. Turns out that if you delete a volume while a snapshot’s being taken, the volume remains in a Deleting state until the snapshot’s completed. Once the snapshot is finished, the volume is fully deleted.

This makes sense. I’m glad it happens this way and we don’t end up with failed snapshots or anything silly like that. +1 for sensibility, AWS.