Remember that planned Xen-related reboot Amazon Web Services warned about last week? Well, things went better than planned, according to an updated blog post Monday.
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, Amazon had said that it would need to reboot about 10 percent of total AWS instances to address a Xen security issue.
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’s true whether the technology used was a live migration, hot patching or maybe something else. The net result was the same: workloads were not interrupted.
The Xen-related security issue also affected Rackspace, Linode and IBM SoftLayer, all of which said they’re doing their own fixes before March 10 when more information is released about the vulnerability.
