Production Readiness Checklist

What this checklist is

A production readiness review you can run before launch, or on a service you just inherited. Each check has a severity and a concrete way to verify it, covering ownership, reliability and capacity, observability and alerting, deployment and rollback, data and recovery, security and incident response.

It has 7 chapters and 37 checks, each with how to verify it and how much it matters. For teams launching or inheriting a service.

Chapter by chapter

1. Ownership and documentation (4 checks)

Someone has to own the service, and the people paged for it need enough written down to act without its author.

2. Reliability and capacity (7 checks)

Whether the service meets an agreed target under real load, and fails in contained, predictable ways when something it depends on goes wrong.

3. Observability and alerting (6 checks)

Whether the team will know about a problem before users report it, and have the data to find the cause.

4. Deployment and rollback (6 checks)

Whether changes reach production through a repeatable, gradual process, and whether a bad change can be undone in minutes.

5. Data, backups and recovery (4 checks)

Whether data survives mistakes and disasters, and whether the team knows how long recovery takes.

6. Security basics (5 checks)

The minimum security posture for a service that handles real users and data. Use a full security checklist for anything sensitive.

7. Incident readiness (5 checks)

Whether the people on call can respond well, and whether the team learns from each incident.

How it works on Sefism

The checklist is one page: each check has a severity (must, should or nice to have) and a concrete way to verify it, and members can tick checks off as they go. The opening chapters are open to everyone. Adding it to your account uses credits, opens every chapter and keeps your progress.

Every claim is checked against the sources listed on the page (8 cited).