A device and corresponding method are provided to provide accurate estimates of how long it will take to install updates to compute nodes in a large-scale computer deployment. a duration prediction model is trained using historical data from previous updates to compute nodes. The features selected to train the duration prediction model are update features including update component type, update component size, update component duration and compute node features including operating system, BMC type/version, UEFI type/version, and generation for each of the compute nodes updated. The historical data for the features is accessed from a metadata store.