Operational Readiness

Operational readiness is the point where a service can be owned safely in production. Treat it as a release gate for new systems and a review cadence for existing systems.

Readiness dimensions

Minimum production checklist

A service should not be considered production-ready unless it has:

• Business owner, technical owner, and on-call owner.
• Source repository, build pipeline, deploy pipeline, and artifact location.
• Defined runtime environment, dependencies, and configuration source.
• Health checks, dashboard, alerts, and service-level objectives.
• Rollback, restore, and incident escalation steps.
• Secrets, identity, and access paths documented.
• Data classification, retention, and backup requirements identified.
• Cost ownership and required tags or labels.

Launch review

Use launch review for material production changes. Keep it lightweight, but make ownership explicit.

• What is changing?
• Who owns the change after launch?
• How is success measured?
• How is failure detected?
• How is the change rolled back or disabled?
• What customer, compliance, or data risk exists?
• What follow-up work is intentionally deferred?

Readiness score

Score each service from 1 to 5 across deployment safety, observability, recovery, security, and ownership. Low scores create backlog items. Do not average away a critical gap; one missing rollback path can outweigh many mature practices.