Scheduled Maintenance & Upgrades

Scheduled Maintenance

ByWater Solutions performs regular maintenance with the goal of consistently improving the system and support services we provide.

Every Tuesday between 9 pm (21:00) Eastern and 11 pm (23:00) pacific, ByWater schedules out-of-hours maintenance for partners. During this time, your Koha system may be briefly unavailable while we perform routine tasks such as patching, or any job that you have requested that we have indicated will be an out-of-hours task.

Regular required infrastructure maintenance that may incur downtime or performance degradation for our hosted partners is scheduled for Tuesday evenings after 9 pm local time, and between 6 am and 10 am Central Time on Sunday morning. We will notify partners for any scheduled maintenance that requires an outage or performance degradation outside of these hours.

Why during these times?

We've selected these times to ensure we can be as quick and effective as possible with ready access to the ByWater systems and development teams, and 3rd party provider support as needed. We serve customers that operate 24/7 in all US time zones.

Upgrades

ByWater Solutions offers regular system enhancements with the goal of consistently improving and expanding the systems and support services we provide. There are two main types of scheduled maintenance: maintenance to the product we're supporting and maintenance to the infrastructure and systems where those products reside.

Major releases typically contain new modules or interfaces, as well as major structural improvements.

Minor releases typically contain minor functionality enhancements and bug fixes to existing functionality. These are applied automatically to your systems on a monthly basis.

Updates and upgrades are applied free of charge, and operating system upgrades to the server will be conducted by ByWater staff as needed.

Hardware maintenance is the responsibility of the library for all self hosted installations of their systems.

Aspen Discovery & Aspen LiDA

• Major releases occur monthly plus minor releases for bugs/patches as needed.

• Release to Test servers will happen the first Thursday of the month in the evening (the evening of the Aspen Gathering).

• All production sites will get the new release the 2nd Tuesday night of the month (the Tuesday night following the Aspen Gathering).

• A public calendar of releases (and other community events), can be found here.

FOLIO

New “flower” versions of FOLIO are available twice a year. They are typically deployed by EBSCO ByWater partners 1-2 months after the initial release. The process is:

• EBSCO takes a snapshot of the partner’s database, and uses it to create a “dry-run” environment on the new version

• ByWater and Partners test this version for 1-2 weeks

• If no major issues are identified, EBSCO plans for an overnight production deployment with downtime estimates provided ahead of time

• Critical Service Patches are deployed as needed. This are done by EBSCO during off hours and typically requires no downtime or testing.

• Partners are informed of upgrade/update timetable by ByWater as soon as we’re notified by EBSCO.

Koha

• Updates are conducted directly in line with the current community release schedule. ByWater typically deploys Koha releases in the spring and fall of every year, generally May and November.

• Major releases occur twice per year plus minor releases for bugs/patches when needed.

• Major upgrades are scheduled with customers and are applied to their system during off hours.

Libki

• Every 4th Monday (starting May 13th, 2024), partners’ Libki servers will be upgraded to the latest stable version available at the time.

• Updated Libki clients will be made to partners on an as needed basis (not every Libki version requires a new client and clients are backwards compatible).

Metabase

• Every 4th Monday (starting May 13th, 2024), partners’ Metabase services will be upgraded to the latest stable version available at the time, provided that there are no major changes that would require additional training or preparation.

Outages