Service details
- Service name
- Owning team
- What it does, in one sentence
Production Readiness Review Checklist
Services reach production without on-call ownership, alerts, or runbooks because nothing blocks them. A readiness review is only useful if it is a gate with an owner who can say no, not a form filled in afterwards.
What you get
- Criteria grouped by reliability, observability, security, and operability
- A must-have versus should-have split, so the gate is realistic
- An exception path with an expiry, for genuine launch pressure
- A sign-off record naming who accepted the risk
How to use this template
- 1
Run it before launch, not after. A review completed after a service is live is documentation, not a gate. Schedule it two to four weeks before launch so findings can actually be fixed.
- 2
Separate must-have from should-have honestly. If everything blocks launch, the review gets bypassed under pressure. Keep the must-have list short enough that it is genuinely non-negotiable.
- 3
Time-box every exception. Launches happen with gaps. Record the gap, who accepted it, what compensates, and when it will be closed, otherwise the gap becomes permanent and invisible.
What's inside
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Frequently asked questions
What is a production readiness review?
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A gate before a service enters production, checking reliability, observability, security, and operability criteria. Its value comes from being a gate with an owner who can withhold approval, rather than a form completed after launch.
What should block a launch?
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A short, genuinely non-negotiable list: named ownership and on-call coverage, user-facing alerts, a tested runbook, logging, backups with a tested restore, a tested rollback, secrets in a vault, and authentication on every endpoint.
How do you handle launches that cannot meet every criterion?
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Record each gap as an exception with a compensating control, a named accepter, and a fix date. Launching with known gaps is normal; launching with undocumented gaps is how services end up permanently unmonitored.