Simplified patching with Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat Insights

Simplified patching with Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat Insights Define, instruct, and patch What is a content template? Connect to Red Hat Insights Red Hat Enterprise Linux | Product trial About the authors Shane McDowell Anthony Johnson More like this Blog post Blog post Original podcast Original podcast Keep exploring Browse by channel Automation Artificial intelligence Open hybrid cloud Security Edge computing Infrastructure Applications Virtualization Share 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. 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. 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.