Production Readiness Checklist for Cloud Applications

Introduction

A production readiness checklist prevents late-stage surprises by validating that your cloud application can handle failures, scale reliably, and remain secure. The checklist below is designed for advanced teams that operate multiple environments and require clear operational guarantees.

Reliability and Availability

• Multi-AZ deployment with automated failover.
• Stateless services where possible to enable horizontal scaling.
• Health checks for liveness and readiness.
• Graceful degradation plans for partial outages.

Scalability

• Auto-scaling policies based on multiple signals (CPU, memory, queue depth).
• Backpressure and rate limiting at the edge.
• Load testing for peak events and disaster scenarios.

Data and State Management

• Backup policies with restore validation.
• Database failover rehearsals.
• Separate read replicas for heavy query workloads.

Observability

• Metrics with SLIs and SLOs.
• Structured logs with correlation IDs.
• Distributed tracing for fan-out request paths.
• Alerting with documented runbooks.

Security and Compliance

• Least-privilege IAM policies.
• Centralized secrets management with rotation.
• TLS for all service-to-service traffic.
• Dependency vulnerability scanning in CI/CD.

Operational Automation

• One-click rollbacks for deployments.
• Infrastructure as code for all environments.
• Drift detection on critical resources.
• Automated patching and image rebuilds.

Example: Readiness Endpoint in Node.js

A readiness endpoint should validate critical dependencies without blocking too long. The example below enforces timeouts and returns a structured response for monitoring systems.

import http from "http";

const dependencyChecks = [
  () => fetch("http://inventory.internal/health", { signal: AbortSignal.timeout(1500) }),
  () => fetch("http://billing.internal/health", { signal: AbortSignal.timeout(1500) }),
];

async function readinessHandler(req, res) {
  if (req.url !== "/ready") {
    res.writeHead(404);
    res.end();
    return;
  }

  const results = await Promise.allSettled(dependencyChecks.map((check) => check()));
  const failures = results.filter((result) => result.status === "rejected");

  if (failures.length > 0) {
    res.writeHead(503, { "Content-Type": "application/json" });
    res.end(JSON.stringify({ status: "degraded", failures: failures.length }));
    return;
  }

  res.writeHead(200, { "Content-Type": "application/json" });
  res.end(JSON.stringify({ status: "ready" }));
}

http.createServer(readinessHandler).listen(8080);

Release Readiness Gate

Before each release, confirm the following:

• SLO compliance for the last release window.
• Security scan results are clean or accepted with documented exceptions.
• On-call coverage and runbooks are up to date.
• Disaster recovery tests were executed within the last quarter.

Conclusion

A thorough readiness checklist is a forcing function that protects uptime, customer trust, and operational sanity. Treat it as a living artifact that evolves with your platform and incident learnings.