Question

A cloud operations team manages a fleet of 400 IaaS virtual machines running a standardized guest OS image. A critical vendor patch has just been released. The team follows ITIL-aligned processes and wants to reduce the risk that the patch destabilizes production workloads while still meeting the emergency remediation window. Which approach best balances operational stability with timely remediation?

Accepted Answer

Deploy the patch to a small pilot ring of representative non-production and canary instances, validate against the configuration baseline, then progressively roll it out to the remaining fleet

Answer

Push the patch simultaneously to all 400 instances immediately to close the vulnerability as fast as possible

Answer

Wait for the next scheduled quarterly maintenance window so the patch can go through the full change advisory board review

Answer

Update the golden image only and let existing running instances remain unpatched until they are naturally recycled