The popularity of AWS is increasing more than ever and businesses from diverse industries are adopting this cutting-edge technology to optimize their operational procedures. AWS brings a wide range of benefits for your business, but this requires optimal management of your resources running on the cloud.

Just like other software products, AWS also offers the feature of patching. A patch is simply an update which fixes the bugs and issues present in the previous versions of the software product. In order to keep your system bug-free and compliant with the latest upgrades, you must perform software patching. 

What is Cloud Patch Management? 

AWS eases patching by offering a dedicated patch manager which uses patch baselines to automatically approve the patches as soon as they are released. Because patching is so important, it cannot be left to chance, nor performed manually with the required level of precision.   This is where AWS comes with an automated patching feature where you can easily manage and supervise the patches and their effect on your AWS applications. 

Patch Baselines & Patch Groups

A patch baseline helps you in determining which patches must be approved for installation. You can create this list manually and automatically as well. Auto-approval feature allows your system to install those patches and updates which are critical to the functioning of your system. All these patches are assigned to instances on your AWS cloud. 

All the instances which require the same type of patching can be grouped into patch groups. All the servers which are scheduled for the approved patches constitute a patch group. 

Minimal Risk of Non-Compliance 

You can face compliance issues if the system or software you are using is not updated with the latest versions. But this is not the case with AWS, which offers an automatic patching process where businesses can get the latest patches for their used instances. Your blacklist and whitelist of patches will keep your instances safe from compliance issues. All this patch management can easily be done through maintenance windows. 

Pay-as-you-Use Patching Mechanism 

Scalability is the standout feature of AWS. The same goes for cloud patching offered by AWS. Businesses only have to pay for the resources and instances which they are managing. AWS patch manager is available free of cost for you to keep your instances updated with the latest patches without worrying about cost overruns or hefty amounts spent manual patching.