Disk Space Issue in google Cloud console

There may be number of reasons why your intance's disk is getting full, some of them being:

• your e-commerce site generates data/logs that take up space
• you have corrupt file system
• your instance got hacked (and it's doing something that uses up tons of disk space)
• you've installed some software that uses up too much disk space

The most immediate thing you can do now to remedy lack of disk space is to enlarge your VM's disk - you can do it by using gcloud utility or on your local machine or running this command directly in the Cloud Shell: gcloud compute disks resize your-disk-name --size=40GB or doing it from the Cloud Console.

Please don't confuse the VM's shell from the Cloud Shell:

Cloud Shell is an interactive shell environment for Google Cloud that makes it easy for you to learn and experiment with Google Cloud and manage your projects and resources from your web browser.

The latter is just a VM that it's free of charge and has gcloud preinstalled for your convinience so you don't have to bother with installing it on any machine. You can just use this one straigt away.

You can resize the disk without stopping your VM !

But - how do you find out the proper disk name ? It's called usually the same as your VM. Go to the VM instances and click on the name of the VM (that your e-commerce runs in) and under the "Boot Disk" you will be able to see the full name:

or go to the Disks page and find the one you need:

Now you can open up the Cloud Shell and:

• select project: gcloud config set project your_proj_name
• resize the disk: gcloud compute disks resize disk-name --size=11GB --zone=your-zone

You will see then:

This command increases disk size. This change is not reversible.
For more information, see:
https://cloud.google.com/sdk/gcloud/reference/compute/disks/resize

Do you want to continue (Y/n)?  y

and later on in between some gibberish you will see: sizeGb: '11'

Another (more simple example) is to do it via Cloud Console. Display disks page and go into disks details; you will see the "EDIT" button in the top-right;

you will see then:

Change the size value and click blue "Save" button on the bottom of the form, give it a moment to resize the disk and enjoy.

That was the first step :) The disk is bigger. Now you have to make the partitions/filesystem "see" the changes to reflect them.

I'm running Debian 10 (and I'm making and educated guess you too, or at least some kind of Liunux) so I will demonstrate how to do this on Debian 10.

If you run lsblk you will see that the OS sees enlarged sda disk even without a restart:

wb@instance-1:~$ lsblk
NAME    MAJ:MIN RM  SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
sda       8:0    0   12G  0 disk 
├─sda1    8:1    0  9.9G  0 part /
├─sda14   8:14   0    3M  0 part 
└─sda15   8:15   0  124M  0 part /boot/efi

but your system partition remains only 9,9GB's so now you have to enlarge it (since probably where your data are). I'm not going to explain the process in detail here since all the instructions you will find in this article.

Now - when you actually have some free space to work with and your e-commerce app can run without issue you can actually start debugging what takes up space.

Start from finding biggest files/directories and if that doesn't yield anything meaningfull and indicate the cause then try nailing down some suspicious processes, even more info here.

I realise this is rather lenghty and tedious process but the alrternative is just to set up new VM with your e-commerce app from the scratch (and possibly move the data) and you definately don't want to do that.