If you are a Linux user, you probably know the hassle of rebooting your system after installing a kernel update. This can sometimes be inconvenient, especially if you are running a server or a critical application that needs to be always available. Fortunately, there is a way to apply kernel
It’s a cool feature, and I played with it some, but I don’t really see how to use it in a home or small office environment unless you’re willing to subscribe to someone who can generate the live patches for you.
I can certainly generate the patches myself, but it’s much faster to let the maintainer of my distro’s kernel handle shipping new packages and accepting the reboot. My system reboots really quickly.
If high reliability is a concern, I would suggest load balancing or some other horizontally scaled solution such that you’re not impacted by one machine going down. Because they will go down for things other than updates!
Not rebooting for a long time makes me nervous once I actually reboot, as I might’ve changed something but didn’t make it persistent. Luckily I’ve become much better with documenting chabges after switching to NixOS.
There are some cases, where scaling is relatively hard to achieve in a sane manner. Especially when you’re in that weird place where you’ve grown out of the SME solutions, but can’t really justify the enterprise solution yet. I’ve worked on such a project, switching to the big boy DB cluster was pushed back again and again because of very high upfront costs (licenses and staff).