Overview
Your customer may ask you when their Edges will upgrade, why every Edge isn’t on the same version, how they can get their Edges updated early, or for planning for an upcoming call event. Maybe they’re running an ad campaign during March Madness and expect lots of calls, so they’re interested in scaling edges up in advance. Maybe they’re part of a vaccine rollout and expect high call volumes, or it’s their busy season. This should help you know how to guide these conversations.
Edge versions (model)
An Edge Version is what most people would think of as the model of the Edge, like iPhone 8 or 11 Pro, and so on. Customers can purchase physical edges (Standard V3, Edge Mini, Edge Micro), or can use Cloud (AWS) edges, if they’re not a BYOC-Prem customer, as we reviewed in our last post.
Edge builds (software)
An Edge Build is the software version that the Edge is running. Think of this like smartphones: your iPhone 12 and my iPhone 10 could both be running iOS version 14.4.2, even though our phone versions are different. The terms Edge Build and Software Version both refer to software that runs on the Edge to make it function. Software Version is the term used in the Genesys Cloud UI. However, Product Support, Development Support, Development, and Professional Services will most commonly use the term Edge Build.
Build numbers
Edge builds are normally referred to by their build number, such as 9982, however, the full build number is 1.0.0.9982. When looking in the Genesys Cloud UI the full version will be displayed.
Build release dates
New builds are released about every two weeks, but there are times where releases take longer.
As Edge builds are released they are announced in the Genesys Cloud Release Notes, specifically the Edge and Media Tier release notes. Edge builds are released first for Manual Update then about a week later for Automatic Update. This is done to allow customers time to test builds before automatic updates if desired. This method also allows customers waiting for important fixes to obtain them earlier than they would via automatic updates.
Build updates
Customers with Physical Edges can do the manual updates on their own, but customers with Cloud Edges would need to open a case with Product Support for us to upgrade their Edges if they cannot wait for the automatic update to be deployed.
Locate the build of your Edge
There are two locations for your build information, depending on the type of Edge you have:
- Go to Admin > Edges to view the Software Version column.
-----OR----- - [LDM Edges only] Go to Admin > Edges> [Edge name} > General tab.
How to update your Edge build
Edges can be updated manually, or automatically. Automatic updates may not be disabled; however, customers can control the window of time in which updates are applied. Customers will ask about this timing, because they’re used to thinking about doing the upgrades themselves, and they want to plan for testing. Helping to reassure customers that this process is automated, and they can sleep peacefully is a huge advantage for having a cloud-based contact center.
Physical Edges
Customers can configure auto update settings from the Site an Edge is assigned to:
- How often updates are checked for (daily or weekly)
- The window of time when updates are checked (All day, or a 2+ hour window)
- Time Zone used to determine the time.
When an automatic update initiates, the Edge immediately launches a call draining process, which is designed to ensure that all existing active calls on the Edge are allowed to complete normally before the software update begins. During the call draining process, no new calls are allowed on the Edge. (Other Edges in the group continue to accept new calls.) Call draining has a 3-hour time limit. After 3 hours any active calls are dropped and the Edge would then update.
The number of Edges that can be updated automatically per day is limited on the Genesys side to protect the Genesys Cloud platform. This limit is per AWS region and applies to all Orgs in the same region. Because of this limit it may take several update cycles for all Edges in an Org to be upgraded. For this reason, Genesys Cloud suggests setting a daily update window, instead of a weekly window.
Cloud Edges
For Cloud Edges, the update window is between 12 AM and 5 AM daily. If the customer needs to adjust this window, they should open a case with Product Support to have the window adjusted. Cloud Edge updates work a bit differently, and new Edge instances are created in AWS. You may hear Product Support refer to this as “spinning up” new Edges. If a customer has 12 Cloud Edges, the upgrade process creates 12 brand new Edges in AWS, and gracefully migrates phone registrations to the new edges. As calls drain off of the old version, those Edges are removed from the environment. When the Edges are removed, this also means that the logs from those Edges are gone, which can sometimes frustrate customers. Our Dev team is working on a way to capture the logs, but it’s not live yet.
