Best practices for conducting patch management
Patch management is a crucial part of every instance of ongoing maintenance. To deploy security patches for either Windows- or Linux-based instances in a standard manner, it is recommended to use the following method:
- Configure the patch baseline.
- Use tagging (that is, labeling) for your VMs to allow patch deployment groups per tag (for example, prod versus dev environments).
- Scan your VMs for deviation from the patch baseline at a scheduled interval.
- Install missing security patches on your VMs.
- For stateless VMs (where no user session data is stored inside the VM), replace an existing VM with a new instance, created from an up-to-date operating system image (note: the process is known as immutable infrastructure).
- Review patch deployment reports.
Now, let us see the application on each cloud platform.
Amazon EC2
Patch management in the context of Amazon EC2 refers to the action of deploying security...