No Guarantees

Layer can’t offer guarantees. We try our best to provide secure, hands-off infrastructure that you are ultimately responsible for. While we can’t offer guarantees, we make a set of promises in how we design, secure, and distribute our software that we believe make it easy to use and will stand the test of time. This page covers the specific status of those promises.

Commitments

• Your index stays in your search system. We will not reimplement indexing. Layer keeps a copy of your data, but the search index lives in your vector store.
• Your history is backed up to S3. Search history and namespace snapshots are written to the S3 bucket you specify. The format of this data may change.
• Data on NVMe. Customer document and chunk data is served from NVMe for price/performance. We try not to stray from this pattern, though some use cases may justify a smaller in-memory document cache.
• This documentation is accurate and up to date. When it isn’t, that’s a bug in the software — report it.
• Graceful degradation. We add graceful degradation support whenever possible — the gateway degrades rather than failing hard. The per-scenario behavior and recovery signals live in the failure-mode runbook.
• Client compatibility. We will (almost) always stay client-compatible with the search systems we front. Where we diverge, it’s a feature making an explicit tradeoff we believe is an improvement.
• One consistency cut per query. When the gateway expands a query into multiple legs (hybrid text fusion, scatter/gather), every leg is filtered at the same stable watermark, injected from a single read. Legs never see different cuts.