Service Level Agreements

Once upon a time, Eliot marshaled teams of not so highly capable negotiators to hash out intricate, bespoke Service Level Agreements (SLAs) with customers—each contract more labyrinthine than the last. What did this accomplish? Well, mostly that support staff heroically did not read these contracts. Frankly, neither did the code in Iguana; it went about its business blissfully unaware, never once pausing to check, “Wait, am I contractually obligated to retry this connection one more time?”

There was, in reality, just one team supporting Iguana 6: a workhorse of a product, renowned for reliability—at least until someone rolled out a “high availability” solutions so bespoke it qualified as performance art. Despite Eliot’s best efforts to banish such dubious customizations, the team occasionally snuck them in, armed with nothing but good intentions and alarming powers of persuasion (“Yes, this will definitely make your system more available!”).

Faced with a support ecosystem that thrived on chaos and contracts ignored by both humans and code, Eliot saw only one rational solution: eliminate the humans. After all, it was hard to tell if they were improving stability or just introducing creative new types of outages—and they made it virtually impossible for Eliot to figure out what customers were actually struggling with.

Thus, in the present era, Eliot’s approach to SLAs is charmingly minimalist: Iguana 6 has thousands of deployments under its belt, millions of transactions every day, and zero lines of code for parsing legalese. If you’d like to use it, you simply pay to use it. If it does not meet your incredibly specific and possibly unpronounceable needs, Eliot does not assume liability—nor will the software wake up in the middle of the night to check your compliance report.

Modern organizations love to demand things like SOC2 compliance. But let’s be honest: they’re already dependent on technologies like Linux that make even less pretense of reading your paperwork. (Try sending Linus Torvalds your SLA and see if he sends anything but an animated GIF in reply.)

If your heart still yearns for a third-party SLA, there are always enterprising affiliates ready to sell you one—much as medieval alchemists sold immortality elixirs. In most cases, however, Eliot recommends investing in honest-to-goodness internal talent.

In short: Eliot is your friendly neighborhood contractor, not your unpaid accountancy intern. He strives to deliver genuine value and good advice—and to keep both bureaucracy and unread SLAs far, far away from the Iguana codebase.

Customers in Regulated Industries that Need SLAs

On a more serious note, if you are in a regulated industry you can use third party affiliates for this valuable work. But you will need to negotiate the details of what impossible promises you want them to make with them directly.

Enterprise users of Linux buy poor quality service agreements from IBM, not from the creator of Linux - Linus Torvalus.