Announcing general availability of Hotpatch for Windows Server 2022 Azure Edition

The eventual goal of Hotpatch is to be in all versions of Windows. Even Windows clients.

There is a huge technical and logistical effort into making traditional patches and their features into hotpatchable systems, and so it starts with the narrowest and simplest case for us: the Azure Edition guest on a narrow set of Azure platforms, with Server Core only, and security updates only.

We will then broaden to Desktop, not just Core. And to quality updates, not just security updates. And to Windows versions besides just Azure Edition or just server.

Azure Edition is a place for the state of the art technology in Windows. It gets major release updates every year, not waiting 3 years like Windows Server. Many, if not most, of those features will just "be passing through" on their way to later broad usage in a variety of platforms - the exception being ones that are truly Azure or Edge specific that we want for use in that new Azure Stack world like Azure Extended Network feature, for instance.