Benchling Infrastructure Upgrade Notification - June 2023

To ensure uptime and overall stability of the Benchling platform, we regularly update and occasionally upgrade necessary infrastructure to ensure we are delivering the best experience for our users.

Benchling infrastructure upgrade schedule

 May 27th, 2023 through June 3rd, 2023 | Saturdays from 4:00pm - 6:00pm PT

What to expect

During the upgrade Benchling will be unavailable for end users and any integrations that may interact with Benchling.

Benchling is performing a rolling upgrade; each tenant will undergo one downtime window during the indicated schedule. Additionally all users will see a banner about the upcoming maintenance, while signed into the tenant, 3 days in advance. 

You may notice an error, like the one shown below, if you attempt to login into Benchling during this window. We expect the downtime to last up to 2 hours for all users.

 Example login error during a database upgrade 

Example Integration connection error during a database upgrade

503 - Service Unavailable

If you have built integrations that depend on Benchling's APIs, please keep in mind that calls to Benchling APIs will not succeed when Benchling is unavailable. It is Benchling's best practice to have any integrations  gracefully handle 503 HTTP response codes. 

We can broadly group Benchling integrations into 3 buckets:

• Benchling-triggered, these are defined as integrations that respond to events or webhooks from Benchling
• Scheduling based, these are defined as integrations that occur on a set schedule (e.g. every hour)
• Externally-triggered, which broadly includes actions that should occur in Benchling, in response to an event or webhook from another system

For Benchling-triggered integrations, there is no impact because they won't go fire during a Benchling downtime.

For Scheduling based integrations, Benchling recommends pausing these integrations and resuming after the downtime has ended.

For externally-triggered integrations, Benchling recommends capturing any external triggers and replaying them after the downtime has ended

Additionally Benchling recommends pausing or rescheduling any long-running operations that might still be running when we start our downtime as they could be interrupted midstream. 

Upgrade Schedule

Will support be available during the upgrade?

Yes! You can also open a ticket by emailing our support team at support@benchling.com or by filling out the form in our help center. You can also contact your Customer Success Manager. In-app chat support will be temporarily unavailable during the upgrade.

Is there any action I need to take after the auxiliary datastore upgrade is complete?

No. Benchling will automatically bring the tenants back up and make them available for your users as soon as the upgrade completes.