Update management in Amazon EC2

We recommend that you regularly patch, update, and secure the operating system and applications on your EC2 instances. You can use AWS Systems Manager Patch Manager to automate the process of installing security-related updates for both the operating system and applications.

For EC2 instances in an Auto Scaling group, you can use the AWS-PatchAsgInstance runbook to help avoid instances that are undergoing patching from being replaced. Alternatively, you can use any automatic update services or recommended processes for installing updates that are provided by the application vendor.

You should configure Windows Update on your Amazon EC2 instances running Windows Server. By default, you will not receive Windows updates on AMIs provided by AWS. For more information, see Best practices for Windows on Amazon EC2.

For a list of the latest Amazon EC2 AMIs running Windows Server, see Details About AWS Windows AMI Versions.