How does Systems Manager Patch Manager automate the process of keeping instances up to date with the latest security patches?

Intermediate

Answer

Patch Manager lets you define patch baselines specifying which patches should be automatically approved, and then apply them across your fleet of instances on a defined maintenance window schedule, automatically reporting which instances are compliant or missing specific patches, removing the need for manually tracking and applying operating system and application patches across potentially hundreds of individual servers.

aws ssm create-patch-baseline --name my-baseline --operating-system AMAZON_LINUX_2 --approval-rules file://approval-rules.json

Real-world example An operations team configures Patch Manager to automatically apply critical security patches to all production Linux instances every Sunday night during a scheduled maintenance window, eliminating the need for anyone to manually track and apply patches server by server.

Common follow-ups: How do you test patches in a staging environment before rolling them out broadly?;What happens if a patch causes an instance to fail after being applied?

Monitoring (CloudWatch);Auto Scaling Groups

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