Editor's note 9.25.2024: This post has been updated to define deprecation and provide clarity on how this impacts WSUS. As part of our vision for simplified Windows management from the cloud, Micr...
Updated Sep 24, 2024
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So...it sounds like at some point you've started relying on tools that go beyond (way beyond) WSUS, and now those tools have been deprecated? That doesn't sound like a WSUS issue at all. Pardon my lack of familiarity, I only have WSUS running within my own LAN, and never connected to (aka "started depending on") anything cloud related. I never jumped on that bandwagon and have no plan to start doing that either - my retirement will come before that. I (fortunately) am the only one involved in this decision-making process.
Azure is very much still a moving target (that's the nature of all hosted environments and cloud services); features come and go as MS pleases, and you have no control over that; that automatically makes it a non-starter for me. As the blog article says, as long as they keep pushing the updates through the WSUS channel (WSUS keeps gets new data wherever it's currently getting it from), WSUS lives on just as it did 3, 5 or 10 years ago, and will keep doing so until "they" turn off that tap.
Heck, even if they do turn off that tap, one could write a script to automate the process of downloading the CUs monthly (the links are always published), map them to OS versions (since the CUs now change that), and if that doesn't match, initiate the remote install. Completely unsophisticated, doesn't take care of the edge cases, but that's scriptable in an afternoon.
The entire point of my initial post was that, as long as the fundamental building blocks remain as they are today, none of this calls for a change for me.
But I'm no system admin, have never been one nor would I ever pretend to be. I do appreciate however that others are not in the same situation as I am.