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ApsaraDB RDS:Increase the storage space of a serverless instance

Last Updated:Mar 10, 2026

If the storage space of your serverless instance is insufficient for your business needs, you can manually increase it.

Important

To ensure product stability and user experience, Alibaba Cloud will discontinue the sale of RDS for SQL Server serverless instances on November 3, 2025, and will stop providing related technical support on June 1, 2026. This includes, but is not limited to, new feature iterations and technical issue fixes. To ensure your product experience, convert your RDS for SQL Server serverless instances to pay-as-you-go instances as soon as possible.

Scenarios

  • Expand the storage space in advance to prevent it from becoming insufficient if you plan to perform operations such as large-scale data imports, database migrations to the cloud, high-write operations, or high-load O&M tasks such as data archiving.

  • Expand the storage space if its usage reaches or exceeds 80%. This prevents insufficient storage from disrupting your instance.

Prerequisites

You have no unpaid renewal orders in your Alibaba Cloud account.

Precautions

  • Increasing the storage space does not affect the databases, accounts, or network settings of the instance.

  • Increasing the storage space does not cause a transient disconnection. The change takes effect in about two minutes.

  • You cannot decrease the storage space after it is increased.

Billing

The fees for an RDS SQL Server serverless instance consist of two parts: RDS Capacity Unit (RCU) fees and storage fees. The following table describes the billing rules for different instance statuses. You are billed based on the new storage capacity after the expansion.

Instance status

RCU fees

Storage costs

Pausing

Billed

Billed

Paused

Not billed

Billed

Starting

Not billed

Billed

Running

Billed

Billed

Procedure

  1. Go to the RDS Instances page. In the top navigation bar, select a region. Then, click the ID of the target instance.

  2. On the Basic Information page, find the Configuration Information section and click Modify Storage Settings.

  3. Click image to increase the storage space.

    Note
    • You cannot decrease the storage space.

    • The minimum increment is 5 GB. The total storage space cannot exceed 4000 GB.

  4. Click Confirm Order and complete the payment.

    The storage space increase takes effect in about two minutes. After the instance status changes to Running on the instance details page, you can view the new storage capacity in the Instance Resources section.

References