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Full stack lifecycle management is a critical ingredient to maintaining a strong security posture throughout the life of your APEX Cloud Platforms. You cannot benefit from the rigorous SDL release efforts unless you are consistently applying Dell and Microsoft updates. Lifecycle management is also important to keep your platforms operating at peak performance and resiliency. We have made it easy to maintain a Continuously Validated State with our automation.
As shown in previous sections, you do not have to leave your Dell APEX Cloud Platform extension in Windows Admin Center to perform system updates. Dell and Microsoft updates sites are periodically queried for available updates that will show in the Updates tab within 4 hours of being released.
Table 1. Update categories, typical cadence, and description
Update Type | Typical Cadence | Description |
Baseline updates | Quarterly | Baseline updates include new features and improvements. They typically require host system reboots and might take longer. |
Patch Updates | Monthly | Patch updates primarily contain quality and reliability improvements. Some patches require host system reboots, while others do not. To fix critical bugs or security vulnerabilities, patches might be released sooner than a monthly. |
Hotfixes | On-demand | Hotfixes address blocking issues that could prevent regular patch or baseline updates. |
All these update types, as a Premier Azure Stack HCI solution, are validated by both Dell and Microsoft engineering teams in our respective labs using mature CI/CD practices. This ensures updates are stable and applied consistently every time to optimize the performance, stability, and security of the platform.
Full stack lifecycle management introduces significant benefits, such as: