Attachment order in aws_volume_attachment

Greetings!

I try to attach new ebs volumes in a specific order. E.g. in this example I create 3 disks and then attach them. Disks are created in the correct order and also they get correct device names (.e.g xvdf,xvdg and etc.), but when terraform attaches it to the EC2, xvdf can be the second one and xvdg will be the first one. So it happens totally randomly.

resource "aws_ebs_volume" "default" {
  count = length(var.data_disk_sizes)

  availability_zone = aws_instance.default.availability_zone
  size              = element(var.data_disk_sizes, count.index)
  type              = "gp2"
  tags              = merge(
    local.common_tags,
    {
      "Name"     = "${var.instance_name}-datadisk-0${count.index + 1}"
    }
  )
}

resource "aws_volume_attachment" "default" {
  count       = length(var.data_disk_sizes)

  device_name = local.lnx_ebs_device_names[count.index]
  volume_id   = aws_ebs_volume.default.*.id[count.index]
  instance_id = aws_instance.default.id
}

var.data_disk_sizes is like [‘50’,‘40’,‘40’]

Is this expected behavior?

Thank you!

No, not really but there’s probably a logical reason for it :slight_smile: How is local.lnx_ebs_device_names defined?

Generally speaking, I try to avoid lists and count in favour of maps and for_each. My main reason for doing it is that I can add/remove items without all the others being recreated, so it’s a lot safer for day-two operations.

Something like this:

locals {
  datadisks = {
    xvdf :  { size : 50 },
    xvdg : { size : 40 }
  }
}

Making a map-of-maps is overkill right now when there is only the one parameter size, but this way I can add more parameters later on when I find out that I need them without things breaking.

This is a very good comment and I thought about the exactly same thing. I re-designed the approach before creating the post but unfortunately, it has the same behavior :frowning: I thought somebody had same issue (and people should because it’s not some rare thing to attach multiple EBS volumes to the same instance). It looks like most of the people specify volumes just directly in aws_instance resource.

This is lnx_ebx_device_names

lnx_ebs_device_names = ["/dev/sdf",
                          "/dev/sdg",
                          "/dev/sdh",
                          "/dev/sdi"
  ]

Maybe I misunderstood you. When you write “first”, and “second”, do you mean the result or the order in which the operations are performed as seen in the log output?

First of all, thanks for the reply! I was expecting terraform to follow the order that I use to define the variable:

var.data_disk_sizes = [‘50’,‘40’,‘30’] #(example)
lnx_ebs_device_names = ["/dev/sdf","/dev/sdg","/dev/sdh","/dev/sdi"]

Terraform creates disks (and that seems to be correct: the first disk is 50, the second is 40 and the third one is 30.
Then it’s trying to attach the disks to the EC2 instance.

Expected result (in this case the order is order of the disks that is displayed in AWS EC2 console):
/dev/sdf is attached as first disk with 50 gb
/dev/sdg is attached as second disk with 40 gb
/dev/sdh is attached as third disk with 30 gb

What’s happening:
/dev/sdh is attached as first disk with 30 gb
/dev/sdg is attached as second disk with 40 gb
/dev/sdf is attached as third disk with 50 gb

It might be that I misunderstood the concept and aws_volume_attachment performs the operation in random order. And disk orders are different every time.

I will trying out for_each once more and see if it can fix it.

Hi,
Have you already figured out usinf for_each?, if so please share the solution. Thanks in advance.

I would imagine something like this would work:

locals {
  disks = {
    sdf = 30
    sdg = 50
  }
}

resource "aws_ebs_volume" "default" {
  for_each = local.disks
  size = each.value
...
}

resource "aws_volume_attachment" "default" {
  for_each = local.disks
  device_name = "/dev/${each.key}"
  volume_id = aws_ebs_volume.default[each.key]
...
}

Hi @nhw76, Thanks for that.

In another post, for_each has been used to achieve this, however I could not figure out how to combine both device_name and size to create a map.

Here is the problem I’m facing. Adding more instances is messing up my volume attachments