Let's get to the area of planned maintenance. This is the only predictable downtime (usually twice a year) on the Azure platform.
Planned maintenance is used to install necessary updates on the platform or for general maintenance, and can have an effect on all of your Azure IaaS deployments (such as Azure VM), or on all of your Azure PaaS solutions based on an Azure VM, (such as Azure Service Fabric).
Here, I first have to take a small step backward. The majority of planned maintenance will not affect the operations of the platform (for example, storage infrastructure updates or physical network infrastructure updates).
With other updates that affect your VMs directly, things look different. This includes the following:
- Host security and compliance patching
- Updates for the Azure host agents
- Updates for the network agents
- HW decommissioning
- HW maintenance
- Host OS rollout
Since each of these updates places specific requirements on the platform, two subtypes of...