Operations · June 2026

A production checklist that fits on one screen

Before a small service goes live, the checklist should stay short enough to read without scrolling through pages of policy text.

• Is there a health check?
• Can logs explain one failed request end to end?
• Is one backup or rollback path already tested?
• Are secrets stored outside the codebase?
• Is one human clearly responsible for the first response?

If the answer is no to any of those, the service is not truly production-ready yet.

Reliability comes less from advanced tooling than from refusing unclear ownership and silent failure.