The Design And Implementation Of Automatic Patching Tool EasyPatch

Servers are very important to all the Internet or other kind of enterprise. As the amout of server increses, the cost of manual operation becomes higher and higher. Tasks like security patching, kernel upgrade and general settings are so frequent but time-consuming.There are over ten thousand Linux servers in Ebay. Operators often need to do kernel upgrade, security patching and other kind of operation work. These tasks can hardly be done by login these servers one by one. Although there are a lot of tools which already meet some automation needs, software system to meet specific business logic is still needed.So, we developed automatic patching and self-service platform EasyPatch based on B/S architecture. The web is written with Python, using Django framework. User login EasyPatch and create self-service task. EasyPatch will schedual these task using Celery framework and email user when necessary.EasyPatch is working fine in the Ebay production environment. It has finished over ten thousand tasks and patched over one thousand servers. As EasyPatch offers self-service task which user can define their own task scripts, it not only helps a lot in the security patching field but also works fine in some other operation fields.