Since the early days of the Serverless Framework, plugins have been a useful tool for our community. It has been a way for anyone to contribute to the effectiveness of the framework by solving problems that just don’t fit within the design of the core framework or are super specialised for important niche use cases. Plugins have become a vital aspect to many projects and yet, there has been a problem.
If you are an organisation building Serverless solutions, Serverless, Inc is here to offer you the support you need so that you can be assured that if any issues arise, you can get a solution as fast as possible. However, if you are that same organisation using plugins, risk rears its head once again. Will the plugins you use have the required level of support you need?
We at Serverless Inc. decided that we needed to find a way to show our appreciation to our community for the amount of work and effort put into developing so many plugin solutions, and at the same time reduce the risk for our enterprise users who need the safety and security of a consistent entity that can be there should the need arise.
This is why we’re proud to introduce the Serverless Plugin Support program, an effort designed to allow Serverless Inc. the ability and capacity to assist in supporting the ongoing maintenance of key plugins developed by our community, so that those organisations who rely on them as a critical part of their Serverless ecosystem can rest assured they will receive the same level of support as the core framework.
The key aspect of this program is the allocation of a support status based on criteria that a plugin must reach in order to qualify. Each level of support also provides different benefits to the authors, from being able to proudly display a support badge on their Github pages, to being able to attend the weekly open source sync meeting where new features for the framework are planned. Each support status also has different SLA’s for existing and future enterprise support customers depending on the package chosen.
For all details about plugin criteria, rewards and enterprise support, we have created a [page specifically for that] (https://serverless.com/plugins/criteria/).
While we have a [form available] (https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfliYMIgUvmHzzPcs2JqZaGZ4e730yODa_h84YdX2HC0ruOgQ/viewform) for any plugin that meets the criteria above to apply for support status, we have already pre-allocated some plugins with support status levels. We will be giving the authors of these plugins until the end of August to make the last few tweaks their projects need to meet any outstanding criteria.
The program is entirely opt-in and while we look forward to as many plugins as possible joining the program, if any authors that have been pre-allocated a certain status do not wish to be a part of the program, they can just contact us at hello@serverless.com and we will remove that status. If, however, you are a plugin author and would like your work to be recognised and supported by Serverless, please apply with the form above.
The three levels of support are:
- Community: The plugin meets some necessary basic documentation and licence requirements. At this level support is provided by the plugin author and Serverless community.
- Approved: The plugin has more stringent documentation as well as automated testing requirements and an author that shows responsiveness to pull requests from Serverless. An SLA to enterprise customers using Approved plugins is in effect.
- Certified: Additional testing requirements as well as providing read and write access to the plugin repo to Serverless. This status has an SLA applied for enterprise support customers
The SLA available on each status depends partly on the support package chosen but can be broken down as follows:
- Community: Receives no additional support beyond what the community can provide, but has been recognised as a potentially supported plugin in the future.
- Approved: Approved plugins will receive the contracted SLA time or 24 hours, whichever is longer.
- Certified: Certified plugins will receive the contracted SLA time or 12 hours, whichever is longer.
We look forward to continue the growth of our community and we foresee plugins remaining a very powerful way for anyone to contribute to the growth of Serverless development and the Serverless Framework. Our thanks goes out to all the members of the community that have put so much time and effort into improving Serverless for everyone, and we look forward to feedback regarding the Plugin Support program.
