Question 1

What's the difference between Automatic Updates and patch management?

Accepted Answer

Automatic Updates is the general idea that software updates itself with little or no user action. Patch management is the organized process of deciding what to update, testing it, scheduling deployment, approving changes, and tracking compliance—often across many machines. In cloud environments, patch management tools usually provide automatic updates plus controls and reporting.

Question 2

When should I use Automatic Updates?

Accepted Answer

Use Automatic Updates when you want faster security fixes and less manual maintenance—especially for common software like operating systems, browsers, and managed services. It’s a good fit for non-critical systems, developer workstations, and services where downtime can be handled via rolling updates. For mission-critical workloads, use automatic updates with safeguards: maintenance windows, staged rollouts (rings), backups, and a rollback plan.

Question 3

How much does Automatic Updates cost?

Accepted Answer

Costs depend on what is being updated and how. Many products include automatic updates at no extra charge (for example, consumer apps and some managed services). In cloud VM patching, the update feature may be included or priced as part of a management service, but you still pay for the underlying compute time, storage, and any extra reboots or replacement instances. Additional costs can come from testing environments, monitoring, and downtime mitigation (like running extra instances during rolling updates).

Automatic Updates

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