UaaS: Software Update as a Service for the IaaS Cloud

With the development of cloud computing, there is a growing number of virtual machines (VMs) in the IaaS cloud. The VM owners can install different kinds of software on demand. However, if the software is not updated in time, it would be a great threat to the security of the cloud. But for the VM owners, it is a tedious task to keep all of the installed software up to date. In this paper we present a new software update model called UaaS (Update as a Service) to handle the VM (online or offline) update automatically. Multiple VMs share one software update service and multiple update strategies are provided for single software, which can be customized at any time. The ability of UaaS has been evaluated by our experiments, and the results show that UaaS can provide software update service successfully and complete update task for lots of VMs with multiple update strategies efficiently.