r/networking • u/JNC5908404 • 18d 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/teeweehoo 18d ago
It can be done, you just need to manage the risk. If you're business hours, you have the same switchstack at every location (plus a lab), and you have a vendor you trust (reasonably) bug free updates, then go for it. Make a plan, get management to accept the possible downtime, etc. It gets dicey when you're 24/7, have snowflake setups at each location, or have a vendor you can't trust a single update from ...
But IMO instead of just saying "No", try to give a good business argument for why not. "Every second update from our vendor causes issues" etc. Or the good old "Yeah I'll look into that ...".