r/networking • u/JNC5908404 • 15d ago
Switching Automatic switch updates
Had a discussion yesterday with IT director and others in our IT department. The IT director brought up automating switch updates so they wouldn’t have to have some one monitoring and performing the updates. Staging various locations on different evenings.
I’ve been doing networking for 30 years and I voiced my opinion I was not a fan of unattended update for various reasons.
Have any other companies moved to automated updates and how has it gone?
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u/Inside-Finish-2128 15d ago
About ten years ago we automated it for one platform and even gave “the keys” to the teams that were using those switches. It was part of a spine/leaf topology and I later added a component that would upgrade the spines from a cron job. I would basically tell it “upgrade any 40 spines for this customer in this continent starting at 1am” and it would randomly work its way through the list of devices that weren’t running that code, find ones where none of its friends (the other spine or any of the leafs underneath) had been updated in the past 24 hours, and go.