Use CreateVolume with an Amazon SDK or CLI

To create an empty General Purpose SSD (gp2) volume

The following create-volume example creates an 80 GiB General Purpose SSD (gp2) volume in the specified Availability Zone. Note that the current Region must be us-east-1, or you can add the --region parameter to specify the Region for the command.

aws ec2 create-volume \
    --volume-type gp2 \
    --size 80 \
    --availability-zone us-east-1a

Output:

{
    "AvailabilityZone": "us-east-1a",
    "Tags": [],
    "Encrypted": false,
    "VolumeType": "gp2",
    "VolumeId": "vol-1234567890abcdef0",
    "State": "creating",
    "Iops": 240,
    "SnapshotId": "",
    "CreateTime": "YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SS.000Z",
    "Size": 80
}

If you do not specify a volume type, the default volume type is gp2.

aws ec2 create-volume \
    --size 80 \
    --availability-zone us-east-1a

Example 2: To create a Provisioned IOPS SSD (io1) volume from a snapshot

The following create-volume example creates a Provisioned IOPS SSD (io1) volume with 1000 provisioned IOPS in the specified Availability Zone using the specified snapshot.

aws ec2 create-volume \
    --volume-type io1 \
    --iops 1000 \
    --snapshot-id snap-066877671789bd71b \
    --availability-zone us-east-1a

Output:

{
    "AvailabilityZone": "us-east-1a",
    "Tags": [],
    "Encrypted": false,
    "VolumeType": "io1",
    "VolumeId": "vol-1234567890abcdef0",
    "State": "creating",
    "Iops": 1000,
    "SnapshotId": "snap-066877671789bd71b",
    "CreateTime": "YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SS.000Z",
    "Size": 500
}

Example 3: To create an encrypted volume

The following create-volume example creates an encrypted volume using the default CMK for EBS encryption. If encryption by default is disabled, you must specify the --encrypted parameter as follows.

aws ec2 create-volume \
    --size 80 \
    --encrypted \
    --availability-zone us-east-1a

Output:

{
    "AvailabilityZone": "us-east-1a",
    "Tags": [],
    "Encrypted": true,
    "VolumeType": "gp2",
    "VolumeId": "vol-1234567890abcdef0",
    "State": "creating",
    "Iops": 240,
    "SnapshotId": "",
    "CreateTime": "YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SS.000Z",
    "Size": 80
}

If encryption by default is enabled, the following example command creates an encrypted volume, even without the --encrypted parameter.

aws ec2 create-volume \
    --size 80 \
    --availability-zone us-east-1a

If you use the --kms-key-id parameter to specify a customer managed CMK, you must specify the --encrypted parameter even if encryption by default is enabled.

aws ec2 create-volume \
    --volume-type gp2 \
    --size 80 \
    --encrypted \
    --kms-key-id 0ea3fef3-80a7-4778-9d8c-1c0c6EXAMPLE \
    --availability-zone us-east-1a

Example 4: To create a volume with tags

The following create-volume example creates a volume and adds two tags.

aws ec2 create-volume \
    --availability-zone us-east-1a \
    --volume-type gp2 \
    --size 80 \
    --tag-specifications 'ResourceType=volume,Tags=[{Key=purpose,Value=production},{Key=cost-center,Value=cc123}]'

Example 1: This example creates the specified volume.

New-EC2Volume -Size 50 -AvailabilityZone us-west-2a -VolumeType gp2

Output:

Attachments      : {}
AvailabilityZone : us-west-2a
CreateTime       : 12/22/2015 1:42:07 AM
Encrypted        : False
Iops             : 150
KmsKeyId         :
Size             : 50
SnapshotId       :
State            : creating
Tags             : {}
VolumeId         : vol-12345678
VolumeType       : gp2

Example 2: This example request creates a volume and applies a tag with a key of stack and a value of production.

$tag = @{ Key="stack"; Value="production" }

$tagspec = new-object Amazon.EC2.Model.TagSpecification
$tagspec.ResourceType = "volume"
$tagspec.Tags.Add($tag)

New-EC2Volume -Size 80 -AvailabilityZone "us-west-2a" -TagSpecification $tagspec