UpdatePanel is used in ASP.NET for doing partial postback. Suppose you are having a page and you want some portion of that page to be refreshed or changed, so in that case why refresh the whole page. In this scenario we may use UpdatePanel and the control inside that updatepanel will get refreshed or changed not the full page(if we want to refresh the whole page then we can do that also).
Apart from that we can have controls which will act as the trigger for partial postback of the updatepanel.It can be a child control(Control inside the updatepanel) or a control outside the update panel.