Patch Management on Microsoft Azure. This blog post is intended to provide a detailed guidance around setting up a Patch Management process on Microsoft Azure Cloud. For all Cloud Iaa. S deployments, having a Patch Management process is essential. It is as Important as Patch Management process at your on premises DCWhy we need Patch managementThere are many compelling reasons, like Plugging any security vulnerabilities in the OS or Installed Application Software. Proactive protection against newer threats and malware. Fixing existing platformsoftware bugs. Performance and stability Improvements. Compare Windows Patch Levels' title='Compare Windows Patch Levels' />Addressing known Issues. Meet Compliance requirements like SOXAnd many moreIn this post, we will look at Patch Management for Cloud Iaa. S deployments, specifically on Microsoft Azure, and for Windows Server based Azure VMs. We will not specifically cover Linux based Azure VMs here, but same base guidance would apply to them equally. However, what we discuss here would equally apply to any other Cloud Iaa. S platform like AWS or GCP. Though, we will occasionally reference the traditional on premises Patch management process, wherever required. Fundamentally, Cloud Iaa. S model is a virtualized abstraction of  physical Infrastructure. It is built on underlying clusters of physical host servers of various capacitiescapabilities. This blog post is intended to provide a detailed guidance around setting up a Patch Management process on Microsoft Azure Cloud. This tutorial explains the usage of the distributed version control system Git via the command line. The examples were done on Linux Ubuntu, but should also work on. Update now Microsoft releases critical patch for Internet Explorer to fix bug that lets hackers take control of ANY Windows machine. The flaw allows an attacker to. Find and compare Patch Management software. Free, interactive tool to quickly narrow your choices and contact multiple vendors. This table shows the latest patch level of SAP GUI on the last line, and full compilations and their patch levels. I will try to change the information as soon as it. Norton Utilities for DOS and Windows 3. The initial 1982 release supported DOS 1. UNERASE utility. This allowed files to be undeleted by. The responsibility of patching these underlying physical host servers rests with the Cloud provider. In case of Azure, Microsoft holds this responsibility. However, for VMs provisioned on the Cloud Iaa. S layer, VM maintenance is sole responsibility of the customers. This model of shared responsibility is same across all Cloud providers, like Azure, AWS, GCP etc. Now lets focus on Patch Management from Microsoft Azure perspective. Microsoft does regularly update VM Images they have published in the Azure Marketplace, with latest patches. These Images are thoroughly tested for stability, before being published in the Marketplace. However, Microsoft does not make the frequencyschedule public for updation of these VM Images. Hence, whenever you create a new VM based on an Image from the Azure Marketplace, you would be lucky if you get one which has been just updated with latest patches. That will save you from applying any additional updates rare chance. In nearly most cases, depending on how far did Microsoft update the Image, you will have to download a largersmaller delta of the applicable patches. Given that both Windows Server OS and Azure Platform are Microsoft products, would have been Ideal if Microsoft had a native automated patch management service in Azure. However, Microsoft does not currently have such a service, nor does it seem to have any plans around Introducing one in the future. If someone tells you that Microsoft OMS addresses this need, know that OMS is currently a half baked solution with very basic update management capability. Microsoft expects customers to either manually do the patch management themselves using native tools like WSUS, MBSA, Power. Shell etc., or use commercial patch management systems. This strategy does not make things any easier for customers. However,  it does Indirectly benefit promoting an ecosystem of ISVs, who build such products to be sold commercially. You can see my feedback to Microsoft around this concern at the Official Azure User Voice forum here Azure User Voice. Once I get a response on this feedback, I will update this post with the response. Organizations considering either migrating their existing on premises workloads to Azure, or building net new Cloud Infrastructure, will necessarily need to consider having a Cloud Patch management process. Orgs already having an existing and mature patch management process at on premises, would assume that all they need to do is follow the same process on Azure. While that is true to some extent, they will still need to revisit their existing process, and fine tune it for Azure Iaa. S model. Orgs who do not already have an existing or mature Patch management process, can follow guidance in this post to help them establishing one for their Azure Iaa. S environment. Lets look at the following step wise approach an Organization should consider, for establishing a patch management process on Azure or any Cloud Iaa. S for that matter Prepare Patch Inventory. Perform VM Baselining. Discover Patch Notification Repository Channels. Setup Patch Management System. Patch Testing Authorization. Patch Monitoring. Stage 1 Prepare Patch Inventory. You should first create a Patch Inventory, which should capture following information for your Iaa. S deployment Identify and list of all patches, past and present, for each VM Server OS versions You can start with patches applied to the VM Baseline you prepare. See Stage 2 below. All patches which failed during testing, and were eventually never applied in production When With reasonsAll patches which failed during testing, but were later fixed and applied in production WhyHowWhen Details of any patch related support Incidents raised with Microsoft PSS or an external Support provider. Authorization status for each patch This will come after Patch testing stage. Production Impact of applying each patch This will come from Patch testing stage. Justification for applying the patch in production This will come from Patch testing stage. Approvals for applying patch in production This will come after patch testing stage. Additionally, you should also prepare another related Inventory for production VMs in your environment, which should capture following information List of all Azure production VMs deployed in the concerned Azure Iaa. Sample United Methodist Wedding Program here. Gta 5 Full Game Download Free For Ps3. S Solution. For each production Azure VM. Configuration Information like Server OSversion, Softwareversions Installed. Role, function, business and security criticality. Accessownership information. All patches applied to the VM in chronological order Since VM provisioning till current date. For each patch successfully applied Testing date and outcome status. Any patch rollbacks performed WhyHowWhenAll rollbacks performed, due to Issues arising from failedrogue patches applied WhyHowWhen Known security Issues, and newly discovered ones. Change trackinghistory for any changes on Security levels. These Inventory Items should be regularly updated on a predefined frequency, which will depend on the patching cycle you may want to follow. Inputs for this Inventory will also come from later  stages in the Patch management process, like from Patch Testing stage. The above listed Inventory data points are not absolutely exhaustive, but should give you a fair Idea on what levle of Inventory you must have, before embarking on Incorporating a patch management process on Azure. Stage 2 Perform VM Baselining. Baselining VMs refers to building an initial stable configuration of the VMs, established at a specific point in time. This means that the VM Server OS, Application Softwares Installed within, and any Initial configurations done on either of these, are thoroughly tested, found stable, and standardized for being used as a base VM configuration. Baselining VMs enables us to reliably restore them from any future state to a previously stable state, and helps probingrectifying any potential problems with a later version. It also helps to minimize amount of patchesupdates we need to deploy on the VMs as well as gives us an ability to monitor compliance at a granular level. Git Tutorial. In this exercise, you learn how to create and work with a local Git repository. Open a command shell for the operations. Some commands are Linux specific, e. Substitute these commands with the commands of your operating system. The comments marked with before the commands explain the specific actions. The following commands create an empty directory which is used later in. Git repository. switch to the home directory. You now create a new Git repository with a working tree. Every Git repository is stored in the. Git repository has been created. This directory contains the complete history of the repository. The. gitconfig file contains the configuration for the repository. Use the git init command to create a Git repository in the current directory. Git does not care whether you start with an empty directory or if it contains already files. Git repository. for the current directory. All files inside the repository folder, excluding the. Git repository. Use the following commands to create several new files. Git repository. The git status command shows the status of the working tree, i. It also shows which. Run it via the following command. The output looks similar to the following listing. On branch master. Untracked files. use git add lt file. Before committing changes to a Git repository, you need to mark the changes that should be committed with the git add command. This command allows adding changes in the file system to the staging area. It creates a snapshot of the affected files. You can add all changes to the staging area with the. Git repository. git add. Afterwards run the git status command again to see the current status. The following listing shows the output of this command. On branch master. Changes to be committed. In case you change one of the staged files before committing, you need to add the changes again to the staging area, to commit the new changes. This is because Git creates a snapshot of the content of a staged file. All new changes must again be staged. Validate that the new changes are not yet staged. On branch master. Changes to be committed. Changes not staged for commit. Add the new changes to the staging area. Git repository. Use the git status command again to see that all changes are staged. On branch master. Changes to be committed. After adding the files to the Git staging area, you can commit them to the Git repository with the git commit command. This creates a new commit object with the staged changes in the Git repository and the HEAD reference points to the new commit. The m parameter or its long version message allows you to specify the commit message. If you leave this parameter out, your default editor is started and you can enter the message in the editor. Initial commitGit also offers a mode that lets you choose interactively which changes you want to commit. After you quit the mode you will be asked to provide a commit message in your EDITOR. The Git operations you performed have created a local Git repository in the. Run the git log command to see the history. Git log for the change. You see an output similar to the following. Author Lars Vogel lt Lars. Vogelvogella. com. Date Mon Dec 1 1. Initial commit. Use the git show command to see the changes of a commit. If you specify a commit reference as third parameter, this is used to determine the changes, otherwise the HEAD reference is used. Review the resulting directory structure. Your directory contains the Git repository as well as the Git working tree for your files. This directory structure is depicted in the following screenshot. If you delete a file, you use the git add. Git version lt 2. A. git commit m Removes the test. Alternatively you can use the git rm command to delete the file from your working tree and record the deletion of the file in the staging area. Use the git checkout command to reset a tracked file a file that was once. The command. removes the changes of the file in the working tree. This command cannot. CAREFUL this deletes the local changes in the tracked file. Git simply delete it. If you use git status command to see that there are no changes. On branch master. Use this command carefully. The git checkout command deletes the unstaged and uncommitted changes of tracked files in the working tree and it is not possible to restore this deletion via Git. The git commit amend command makes it possible to rework the changes of the last commit. It creates a new commit with the adjusted changes. The amended commit is still available until a clean up job removes it. But it is not included in the git log output hence it does not distract the user. See git reflog for details. Assume the last commit message was incorrect as it contained a typo. The following command corrects this via the amend parameter. More changes now correctYou should use the git amend command only for commits which have not been pushed to a public branch of another Git repository. The git amend command creates a new commit ID and people may have based their work already on the existing commit. If that would be the case, they would need to migrate their work based on the new commit. Create the following. Git directory to ignore the specified directory and file. Not. Track. File. The above command creates the file via the command line. A more common approach is to use your favorite text editor to create the file. This editor must save the file as plain text. Editors which do this are for example gedit under Ubuntu or Notepad under Windows. The resulting file looks like the following listing. Not. Track. File. It is good practice to commit the. Git repository. Use the following commands for this. Adds. gitignore file.