What's the best approach when it comes to updating a production(on ec2) machine that can't go down?

Posted by Ryan Detzel on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by Ryan Detzel
Published on 2011-02-23T14:50:02Z Indexed on 2011/02/23 15:26 UTC
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ubuntu

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amazon-ec2

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upgrade

We have three main servers on ec2, web, database, and search. I logged in today to find:

77 packages can be updated. 45 updates are security updates.

which scares the crap out of me so I want to update these machines asap but I'm scared to just run the updates on a live running system. Is this safe to do, what's the best approach when it comes to doing security updates on production machines?

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