[MUSIC] In this chapter, you will learn about OS Management within OCI. There are three things we are going to talk about here, and hence, we will have three videos. The first video will talk about an overview about the OS Management Service, which is what this video is. And then we will specifically look at for Linux from Oracle, and for Windows, what does this service offer. So to understand OS Management, it is a service that helps customers to automate the software patching and package management. Within the compute instances, you have, which could use either Oracle Linux or Windows operating systems. This is integrated with the console, also with APIs and CLI-based interaction, and most importantly, this service is free of cost. So, what is the purpose of this service and how does it help? If you are using OCI, and you have provisioned various instances as part of your tenancy, maybe, some of them are of the same OS, let us say, Oracle Linux 7.7, for example. So if you have a collection of 7.6, for example, if you have a collection of nodes, I have given here only two, let's say there are 20 or 100. Whenever there is any update to be installed, you need to download the update, and manually install in each computer explicitly. Whereas, with OS Management, you can automate it by using the OS Management Service. So you can group instances into managed instance groups, which are all of the same family of Oracle Linux or Windows, and you can create jobs to apply these patches or CVEs, the vulnerability exposures that could be there. And that's exactly what OS Management is all about. So within the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure console, you have the ability to go to OS Management, wherein you can configure the various components that are involved. We will look at that in detail a little later, various parts within it. And in every compute instance that you have, if you go to the compute instance page, you get a section for OS Management within it, wherein any updates available to this compute instance would be visible, and you can apply them individually. So what is this giving us as a benefit? Number one, automated patch management. You can identify what patches have been released, or bugs that have been fixed, or enhancements that have been made available for any particular operating system release, and apply them to specific instances or instance groups, which you group as a collection of instances with the same OS. And you can either apply them immediately or schedule the patch or updates to be applied at a particular point in time by scheduling job. You can look up for CVE packages that are made available. You can search, and identify them, and get them installed. And ease of search to install and remove packages across a group of instances. The basic idea could be, you may have a set of nodes which have the same application installed, maybe, which is having a load balancer front ending it and you want to install the same patch or the same update across all of them, you can put them into a managed instance group, and apply updates to them as a collection of nodes. So why use this service? Number one, the fundamental idea behind using any IT infrastructure is to be secure and reliable. The basic thing you'll take care there at an OS level, you need to be updated with respect to the security and bugs fixes, which is easily done with OS Management. Ensure you're compliant with respect to the security posture that you want to manage. And view and install CVE packages that might be available. And doing this can be a very complex task if you had to apply them on individual instances. As a tenant, you might have hundreds of compute instances doing various tasks. You have an integrated view from the console or with other means of accessing OCI, wherein you can manage a fleet of servers with a few clicks. And automation reduces human interference, which means we reduce human error, and a single tool for managing both Oracle Linux, as well as Windows environments. You save time if you had to manually perform these operations, there is a manual labor involved plus time involved. The moment you use our OS Management as a service, you are automating the whole plethora of computers that you might have within OCI by scheduling jobs or applying updates as in when you need, and the flexibility ensures you know when these updates will be applied using the OS Management service. And number one, this service itself is free of cost. So the cost involved in getting it done is reduced. And if you had to do it manually or use any other tool, there would be a cost involved. So you reduce manual intervention and thereby, labor costs, plus reduce human errors, so that you don't need to do rework. And this service itself is free of cost for any tenant within Oracle Cloud. This is a high level overview about OS Management service. In the next couple of videos, we will specifically look at how is this useful with Oracle Linux instances and Windows instances explicitly.
