Simplified patching with Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat Insights

The most common task facing system administrators is patching infrastructure. It’s time consuming, it requires coordination with application teams and stakeholders, and it often must happen in segments over time. These complications make it difficult to maintain environmental consistency, which in turn can lead to instability, performance issues, and more time spent by operations staff. Using Red Hat Insights content templates to patch Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) helps limit the complexity of these activities while also increasing consistency across an IT estate.

Define, instruct, and patch

Using Red Hat Insights, the process is simplified and more prescriptive: Define the software you want in your environment, instruct your Red Hat Insights-registered systems to pull updates from that set of software, and patch.

It doesn’t matter whether you patch your RHEL system today or three weeks from now, you can have greater confidence that the updates installed in your environment are the ones you want, and nothing more. For each subsequent patch cycle, you update your definition, which automatically instructs your systems to pull updates from this new set of updates, and you patch.

What is a content template?

In Red Hat Insights, this set of software is called a content template. You can create a content template on the Hybrid Cloud Console content template page.

A content template is defined by a date and a set of package repositories, which can include those provided by Red Hat, partners, or custom repositories created by you. Any system you associate with that content template is automatically limited to the set of updates from those repositories on the date you’ve selected. You can then update your systems using the schedule and method of your choosing, knowing that the end result will be systems with a more predictable and consistent set of software installed.

Suppose you have a public cloud deployment with test systems and production systems, all connected to Red Hat Insights and Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform. You would create one content template for your test systems and one content template for your production systems. Both content templates would include the same set of repositories needed to patch the RHEL systems and the workloads running on them.

On day one of your patching cycle, you update the date on your test content template, making new updates available to your test machines, and patch those systems with Ansible Automation Platform. Once you are satisfied with the tests, you update the date on your production content template to match the date of the test content template, making the same set of new updates available to your production machines, and again orchestrate the patching of those systems with Ansible Automation Platform. Until your next patching cycle, those machines are up to date based on your definition of the software you want in your environment and this fully-patched status will be visible in Red Hat Insights.

Connect to Red Hat Insights

Connecting your RHEL systems to Red Hat Insights also unlocks the full value of your RHEL subscription, allowing you to access security, configuration, and compliance analysis for all of your RHEL machines. See the Red Hat Insights Information and Resources page for frequently asked questions, videos, analyst papers, labs, and many more resources for Red Hat Insights.

When you are ready to get started, you can read more about how to set up and use Red Hat Insights content templates to manage the updates for your RHEL machines.