Service Owner Guide

Service owners use the blue book to launch, operate, migrate, and support production services safely.

Read first

Start with:

• Service Onboarding Checklist
• Operational Readiness
• Production Readiness Template
• Runbook Template
• Incident Management

Service owner responsibilities

Service owners should know:

• What the service does and who uses it.
• How it is built, deployed, rolled back, and observed.
• What dependencies it has and how they fail.
• What data it handles and how it is protected.
• Who responds to incidents and escalations.
• What costs it creates and how ownership is tagged.

Launch checklist

Before launch, confirm:

• Repository, pipeline, artifact, and runtime links exist.
• Dashboards and alerts route to the right team.
• Rollback or disablement path is documented.
• Secrets and access are least privilege.
• Runbook covers common failure modes.
• Service catalog entry is complete.

Watchouts

• Owning code is not the same as owning production behavior.
• Alerts without runbooks create responder pain.
• Dependencies need failure behavior, not just a list.
• Production readiness decays unless reviewed after major changes.