Livepatch on-prem with AWS S3 patch storage

In an AWS EC2 deployment of livepatch on-prem, it makes sense to use S3 for patch storage if the expected number of client machines is high (over 2000).

To configure this, follow these steps:

  • Create an S3 bucket in the preferred region (best if the region is the same as the deployment’s). Care needs to be taken to make the bucket not world-writable as this would pose a significant security risk.
  • Create an access point with permissions to perform operations on that S3 bucket.
  • Create a programmatic IAM user account with permissions to perform S3 operations.
  • Configure the relevant S3 config options

Once this is configured, livepatch will store and retrieve patch files from the S3 bucket.

A further improvement is to configure livepatch on-prem to serve patches from the S3 bucket directly. For that public http access needs to be allowed to that bucket. Set your server’s URL template config to something resembling:

https://<bucket.s3-<region>.amazonaws.com/{filaname}