Perl has been around for more than 30 years now and it has been used a lot on Unix systems. On modern systems, Python is the future proof language to go for. Besides that, there are still a lot of Shell scripts used everywhere. Some of them might be very old, but still very important.
Although languages might be old, scripts might still be part of lots of automated tasks on millions of systems around the world. Finding engineers that have a strong knowledge to fix problems might be hard and expensive.
Python is a more modern language, but lots of scripts were written in the past and not every IT professional is capable of decrypting, modifying or fixing older scripts.
Through the years I wrote hundreds of scripts in Perl, Shell and Python and I’m particularly good at decrypting scripts that have been written by other people.
A big risk to any organization if heaving technology that was created by people that left your company. How do you cope with this risk? You hire someone who covers that risk for you. You can see it as an insurance policy. If the scripts break, you call someone to fix them for you. It costs you a monthly fee, but it will make you sleep much better at night, knowing that you are covered when things go wrong.
Support Contract
What?
Verbois IT Consulting BV provides a service to overcome your problems and to cover your risks. This service includes support on any script that was ever created in your organization.
How?
During the onboarding of scripts, we will make an assessment of the importance of the script in your organization. Where does it connect to? Does it have external dependencies? What if it breaks, can the steps be performed manually as a temporary workaround?
This process will lead to a document for every script, describing how it was build and defining the business risks of the script and how to cope with them.
After this first step, the script will be taken into management by Verbois IT Consulting BV and this means you will be provided the support as is defined in the Service Level overview.
Service overview
This is what we foresee as part of the service:
| Service | Part of support | Extra charge | Out of Scope |
|---|---|---|---|
| Basic problems (No changes to the environment) | YES | – | – |
| Version update problems (e.g. python version is updated) | YES | – | – |
| Business modifications (New functionality/changes to dependencies) | – | YES | – |
| Migration of script to new server (e.g. server is replaced by a new server) | – | YES | – |
| Full refactor of script | – | – | YES |
Service Levels
To provide support on scripts, we work with a monthly subscription fee. This fee is calculated based on the following topics and the different service levels:
| Service | Base Support | Standard Support | Enterprise Support |
|---|---|---|---|
| Up to 10 scripts and 20 KB of code | X | X | X |
| Up to 50 scripts and 100 KB of code | – | X | X |
| Up to 100 scripts and 500 KB of code | – | – | X |
| Light Disaster recovery plan | – | X | X |
| Standard disaster recovery plan | – | Optional | – |
| Full disaster recovery plan | – | – | Optional |
| Incident Support | X | X | X |
| LCM support | – | X | X |
| Patch within 7 days | X | X | X |
| Patch within 72 hours | – | X | X |
| Patch within 36 hours | – | – | X |
| Block of 50 scripts or 100 KB of code | – | Optional | Optional |
Disaster recovery plans
Light disaster recovery plan
The “Light disaster recovery plan” will just list all the information in the script and its dependencies. It will not contain any research about the business value of the script.
This will by default be part of a Standard and Enterprise support level.
Standard disaster recovery plan
The standard disaster recovery plan will contain some information about the business value. To be able to create this we will need some information about dependencies of the script, so it can be documented what needs to be done if the script fails.
Full disaster recovery plan
The full disaster recovery plan will contain all the information from the previous documents, but it will also contain more in depth business information. It will also contain a plan to execute the steps in the script manually if possible, so they can be executed when the script fails.
Disaster recovery plan overview:
| Topic | Light | Standard | Full |
|---|---|---|---|
| Script flow chart | X | X | X |
| Script dependency overview | X | X | X |
| Script business value | – | X | X |
| Business risk assessment | – | X | X |
| Manual execution Steps | – | – | X |
| List of contacts involved | – | – | X |
Support levels
Incident support
This type of support means that you will be able to log tickets about a problem with one of te scripts supported by Verbois IT Consulting BV. The problem will be investigated by us and an appropriate response will be provided.
It might be needed that more information must be delivered or certain tests must be run. When this information is delivered,
LCM Support
If a script is affected by an OS upgrade, or an upgrade of the language interpreter, we will fix it as part of the service. It is needed to provide us with the correct version and we will fix the problem and deliver a modified script for testing.
Time and Material support
If your architecture changes or one of the dependencies change, we will also support making this change, but it will not be part of the service price.
SLA information
SLA is measured based on the time that is needed to create a first patch of the problem. Since this cannot be tested by Verbois IT Consulting, we are dependent on the customer (you) to test it. During the period to fix the script, we might also be waiting for information on you side. In that case, the SLA clock is also stopped.