Regularly patching your instances with the right set of security patches is an important activity that can take up a lot of time and effort if performed manually on each individual instance. Luckily, AWS provides a really efficient and easy way of automating the patching of your managed instances using the concept of Patch Manager services, provided as an out-of-the-box capability with SSM.
As an administrator, all you need to do is scan your instances for missing patches and leverage Patch Manager to automatically remediate the issues by installing the required set of patches. You can, alternatively, even schedule the patching of your managed instance or group of instances with the help of SSM's maintenance window tasks.
In this section, we will explore a quick and easy way of creating a unique patch baseline for our Dev instances and later create and associate a maintenance window for this, all using the EC2 Management dashboard...