productionfirst

Productionfirst is a discipline and set of practices that prioritize the production environment's stability, observability, and readiness when planning and delivering changes. It treats production readiness as a gating factor for releases and emphasizes measuring success in terms of live-system quality rather than development milestones.

In software and IT operations, productionfirst aligns with DevOps, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), and modern release engineering, advocating that deployments should not occur unless the system can meet defined production criteria.

Key principles include production readiness reviews, automated testing that exercises production-like workloads, feature flags to decouple release from change, canary or blue-green deployments, robust monitoring and alerting, health checks, runtime guards, and clear rollback procedures.

Implementation typically involves defining definitions of ready and done that tie to production criteria, establishing service level objectives and error budgets, enabling continuous observation of latency, error rates, saturation, and capacity, and using automation to enforce compliance.

Critics argue that overemphasis on productionfirst can slow delivery or create bureaucratic overhead if applied rigidly, so successful adoption depends on culture, governance, intelligent automation, and risk-based decision making.

See also: production readiness, DevOps, SRE, continuous delivery, release engineering.