Maintenance and Outages

Maintenance Schedule
The details of FCS's routine maintenance, emergency maintenance and activities can be found on the FCS maintenance calendar. Click here to add the maintenance schedule to your calendar.

FCS Outage Calendar
Starting January 2024, the details of FCS outages and Root Cause Analysis (RCA) that impact tenants will be found on the FCS Outage Calendar. Click here to add the FCS Outage Calendar to your calendar.

FCS Maintenance

FCS maintenance details will be posted on the FCS maintenance calendar. Tenants will receive an email prior to each Emergency maintenance window with details and required actions (if needed). If these emails are not being received, please submit a Standard FCS Support Request (include distribution list, names and emails).

Security patching of FCS Instances (please refer to the FCS Maintenance calendar for details) occurs bi-weekly on Thursdays.

Platform Maintenance

MCaaS (Multi-tenant CaaS)

Weekly on Mondays - as needed EKS AMI and addon patching, AWS releases new AMIs approx. once every 2-3 weeks. FCS will add to maintenance on the Monday of the following week during maintenance. Dev/Test first week and Staging/Production the next week.
Monthly on Mondays - jumpbox full re-provisioning, FCS will automate to detach shared storage and redeploy jumpbox with all tools, and reapply shared storage.
Bi-Weekly on Wednesdays - helm backend chart patching. FCS will start with Dev/Test first week and work Staging/Production environment the following week.
Bi-Weekly on Wednesdays - tenant jenkins patching. FCS will start with patching and testing on "B" non-live jenkins instances, then following week we will cutover for tenants to new patched systems.
Weekly Jumpbox yum and reboot (core hours) - Weekly yum patching of all ssh tunnel jbs, and other jbs. FCS will patch during normal hours, reboot overnight using cron.

EBTA (Everything But the App)

EBTA Amazon Machine Image (AMI) updates - will be scheduled bi-weekly for Dev/Test and bi-weekly for Production. Production AMI updates will be scheduled for the week following the Development and Test AMI Update. Please refer to the FCS Maintenance calendar for scheduled activities.
Third Thursday - FCS service patching for Jenkins, Docker, JMeter, SonarQube, SonarScanner, CFSSL (on weeks that may conflict with bi-weekly security patching, please refer to the FCS Maintenance calendar for details)

CaaS (Container as a Service)

First Thursday - CaaS Docker Image update during FCS core business hours from 2:00 to 4:00 p.m. ET
Third Thursday - FCS service patching for Jenkins, Docker, JMeter, SonarQube, SonarScanner, CFSSL (on weeks that may conflict with bi-weekly security patching, please refer to the FCS Maintenance calendar for details)

API Exchange

Bi-Weekly on Wednesdays - Updating WS02 APIM, Analytics, and EI to the latest version in Test & Staging
Bi-Weekly on Thursdays - Updating WS02 APIM, Analytics, and EI to the latest version in Production, following the Test & Staging updates the week prior

FCS Security Schedules

Tenants should be aware of the follow schedule for security operations. Details by FCS environement are listed above and upcoming dates can be used for planning in the calendar below.

Security Patching & Remediation

MCaaS: Weekly on Mondays - details listed above
EBTA: Biweekly and Third Thursdays - details listed above
CaaS: First and Third Thursdays - details listed above

Security Scans - Thursdays - Infrastructure, Host, and Web Apps
Security Reports - Thursdays and AMI Reports Friday (Rebuilding to get latest) - further details by FCS environment listed above

NEED HELP?

Additional maintenance support can be requested using the Standard FCS Support Request. If support is needed outside core hours (Monday - Friday, 8 AM - 6 PM EDT), please submit an FCS After Hours Support Request on JSM.

End of Life Software, Tools & Licensing

As an FCS Tenant, it is imperative to stay up to date with the latest End of Life (EoL) inventory details as usage of such unsupported components increases the attack surface within FCS. Moreover, any usage of EoL components is a definitive ATO Showstopper and could significantly delay issuance of an ATO. For more information regarding EoL Inventory and decommission schedules, please contact: fcs-support@gsa.gov.