Updating Coldfusion 2016 update 7 to Update 17 - Help

Sajan, the answer is a conditional yes or no. In the case of the specific jump you are referring to, technically the answer is no (for most people, as I will explain). 

First, to be clear, yes, all CF updates are cumulative. NORMALLY, one could indeed skip to the latest they want. But in the case of CF2016 (and 2018), there are two conditions that change that circumstance, and there are in fact two updates between your update 7 and update 16 that you will need to consider implementing first, and almost certainly will need to.

And second, note that the top of the technote that you want to apply will explain this when necessary (though the wording is not always as obvious as it can be)  If you look at the top of the technote for CF2016 u17, you see it explaining points:

• you should consider doing update 11 first, if you want to use the CF Admin UI to download updates beyond that (like 17).
• Then you also need to understand that in skipping update 14, there is still an important REQUIREMENT (that comes FROM that update) where you must run the CF web server connector (wsconfig) to "upgrade" any current web server connectors you have (in your case on Linux, from Apache to CF). If you do not, your web sites will seem broken.

To be clear, it's not that you need to FIRST update to 14, just that if you do it or skip it, you need to do a step that was required AS OF that update. Again, the technote points you to the technote for update 14, where Adobe then shared more details.

Some people never have to use the wsconfig tool, so that need to do the "upgrade" can really throw them. There's both a command line and a gui way to do that wsconfig upgrade, including one command-line approach to upgrade ALL connectors.

Even then, note that for some folks it's NOT enough to JUST upgrade the connector. Another "security" facet of that required upgrade (which is caused by Tomcat, that CF runs on, rather than by a choice of Adobe's) is that you may need to modify an "address" attribute for the AJP connector element in the server.xml file for your CF instance. And you may need to add yet another attribute. Again, the technote talks about these, and the need to then restart CF. I also cover al that in a blog post with still more info.

Finally, note again that all the above applies also to those updating CF2018 (referring to different update numbers, of course, but the SAME issues).

If not for those issues, again normally you COULD otherwise just go to the latest available update. These are very unusual issues, but for many they cannot be ignored.

Let us know how it goes.