When Azure virtual machine scale sets were introduced, we made it easy to deploy and manage cloud infrastructure at very large scale. We are continually looking for ways to lower the overall cost of managing cloud infrastructure. One area of cost that increases with scale is maintaining each virtual machine patched to the latest OS version, while keeping your applications running. This means finding ways to smoothly roll out an upgrade, one batch of VMs at a time. Many OS providers create new patched versions of their VM images at a monthly cadence, or more frequently for critical security fixes, but checking for, and manually rolling out these upgrades adds to cloud infrastructure management cost.
Today we are announcing a new set of automation features to simplify OS image upgrades for scale sets, allowing you to adopt a set-it-and-forget-it approach to OS lifecycle maintenance.
Read more about it in the Azure blog.