Automating server maintenance and patching

I once had a friend whose only job most days was to wait for a website to go down, check why it had gone done, and do one of two things or commands that he had been given to bring it back up again. I had another friend whose job was to manually restart an NGINX server whenever it went down. I once met a man whose job largely involved just downloading CSVs from one place, putting them somewhere else, and clicking a start button. Now, to some of you, that might sound like a swell gig (to me, it doesn’t sound half bad either), but the thing about it is that it is a waste of time for both that individual’s employers and that individual themselves. There is no growth or improvement for either, and in my experience of life, that is a waste of human life.

In the coming samples, we are going to see how we can maintain multiple instance fleets based on a series of common commands and then we are going to find a way to patch an OS after...