Please be aware of these established maintenance windows from Amazon Web Services and Blackboard, and schedule your activities on BbLearn (bblearn.atu.edu) accordingly. If you have any problems, questions, comments, or concerns, please contact the Campus Support Center at 479-968-0646 or email them at campussupport@atu.edu.
Amazon Web Services Weekly Maintenance Window
Blackboard utilizes Amazon Web Services (AWS) to host their Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) clients on the cloud. As one of these Blackboard SaaS clients, we are subject to AWS's maintenance schedules and they have recently announced an established maintenance window that occurs weekly on Tuesday mornings at 3:00 - 3:30 AM CST.
They say this about the maintenance window...
"The standard maintenance window is a maximum of 30 minutes. Work may or may not happen during this window. Typically work performed during this window takes less than 30 minutes (while our highly available components failover across avail zones). During the maintenance window, AWS performs work on clusters and instances in batches and our processes failover active clusters and instance to a different availability zone. For example, RDS and or Infrastructure changes may occur and take 30 seconds to complete, and batch one starts at minute one and batch two starts at minute two. For the security and stability of your environment, maintenance can cause instances to be briefly unavailable."
Blackboard Learn Monthly Updates
As a part of the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform our Blackboard Learn system now runs on, and it's Continuous Delivery method for updates, Blackboard pushes out monthly releases of the Blackboard Learn LMS to the servers running our instance of the product (bblearn.atu.edu) on AWS. Each release contains new features or feature enhancements, as well as maintenance items. These updates are expected to be pushed out by them in the early evening hours. While no one anticipates any problems during these times, please be aware that there is always a possibility for unexpected issues.
More information on the monthly dates of the updates can be found here.
More information on the contents of the updates can be found here.