<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?><oembed><version><![CDATA[1.0]]></version><provider_name><![CDATA[Gigaom]]></provider_name><provider_url><![CDATA[http://gigaom.com]]></provider_url><author_name><![CDATA[Barb Darrow]]></author_name><author_url><![CDATA[http://search.gigaom.com/author/barbdarrow/]]></author_url><title><![CDATA[Amazon hones its cloud update process]]></title><type><![CDATA[link]]></type><html><![CDATA[<p>Remember that planned <a href="https://gigaom.com/2015/02/27/xen-security-issue-prompts-amazon-rackspace-cloud-reboots/">Xen-related reboot Amazon Web Services</a> warned about last week? Well, things went better than planned, according to an <a href="https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/maintenance-2015-03/">updated blog post</a> Monday.</p>
<p>The company said it was able to perform live updates on 99.9 percent of the affected instances, avoiding the need for a reboot altogether.  Last Thursday, <a href="https://search.gigaom.com/company/amazon/">Amazon</a> had said that it would need to reboot about 10 percent of total AWS instances to address a Xen security issue.</p>
<p>The ability of AWS to perform updates without shutting down and bringing back up compute instances comes as very good news to cloud users. And that&#8217;s true whether the technology used was a <a href="https://gigaom.com/2015/01/10/for-cloud-players-hot-patching-may-be-hotter-than-live-migration/">live migration, hot patching</a> or maybe something else. The net result was the same: workloads were not interrupted.</p>
<p>The Xen-related security issue also affected <a href="https://search.gigaom.com/company/rackspace/">Rackspace</a>, Linode and <a href="https://search.gigaom.com/company/ibm/">IBM</a> SoftLayer, all of which said they&#8217;re doing their own fixes before March 10 when more information is released about the vulnerability.</p>
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