1. Best practices for operating cloud deployments efficiently
  2. Manage Your Operating Systems

Manage Your Operating Systems

Understand and adopt procedures that keep your operating systems current with the latest OS and security patches.

Check Exposure to Known Vulnerabilities

Security Architect

Regularly check Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) to determine the level of exposure in your Oracle Cloud Infrastructure tenancy. CVEs provide standard names for publicly known security vulnerabilities and exposures that are cataloged in a dictionary-type format for reference.

The Oracle Cloud Infrastructure OS Management service offers a CVE search facility that enables you to search for a CVE, to see the packages and instances affected by the CVE, and to push out package updates to instances to patch them.

Establish a Maintenance Schedule

DevOps Architect, Infrastructure Architect, Application Architect

It's important to have predefined schedules to apply this maintenance, and you can ultimately decide to do this in a few ways.

Some key decisions include:

  • Will you patch virtual servers in place, or will you destroy and recreate from scratch?
  • What frequency do you need to patch your servers?
  • How quickly can you apply a patch across your landscape if an urgent need arises?
  • Will you patch production and non-production at separate intervals? If so, how much time will separate them?

Stay Up-to-Date with Security Patches, Bug Fixes, and Enhancement Updates

DevOps Architect, Security Architect

Ensure compliance by keeping track of security updates and bug fixes that address security vulnerabilities found during development, testing, or reported by users.

In addition to security and bug fixes, take advantage of enhancement updates that introduce new features, improve functionality, or enhance performance in the package's software.

The Oracle Cloud Infrastructure OS Management service enables you to:

  • Easily search for, install, and remove packages.
  • View inventory of installed and available packages and updates.

Automate OS Management

DevOps Architect, Security Architect

With Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), operating systems are largely handled by the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure OS Management service. The OS Management service allows you to manage updates and patches of your Linux or Windows OCI instances.

OS Management is an integrated service within the OCI Console, and it includes a command line interface. The service provides a dashboard that identifies available security, bug, and enhancement updates for your Oracle Linux instances.

Flexible patching options enable you to manually apply or schedule automatic updates. Scheduling automatic updates helps you stay up-to-date and compliant with security and patching policies without human intervention, which saves you time and costs.

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