productionreadiness

Production readiness refers to the state in which a software system, service, or platform is prepared to operate in a live production environment. It encompasses the ability to sustain reliable performance, secure handling of data, and practical operability by the production team. The concept is used across software engineering, cloud services, and IT operations to reduce the risk of outages and incidents after release. The term is sometimes encountered as productionreadiness, highlighting the idea of readiness as a built-in quality rather than a one-time milestone.

Key domains of production readiness include reliability and availability (redundancy, failover capability, defined service level objectives and indicators), performance and capacity (scalability, response times, resource management), security and compliance (hardening, access controls, auditing, data protection), and manageability and operability (monitoring, logging, runbooks, change management). Governance aspects cover risk assessment, release planning, and documentation of expectations for production support.

Assessment typically relies on predefined criteria, checklists, and gates that authorize progression from development or staging to production. Common requirements include code quality, automated tests, security scans, dependency management, disaster recovery validation, and backup tests. Deployment practices such as automated CI/CD pipelines, canary or blue-green releases, feature flags, and robust rollback procedures support controlled production transitions.

Operational practices underpinning production readiness include comprehensive monitoring and alerting, incident response playbooks, post-release reviews, and well-maintained runbooks. The concept aligns with DevOps, DevSecOps, and site reliability engineering, emphasizing observability, reliable releases, and continual improvement. Production readiness is viewed as an ongoing state, revisited as the system evolves and scales.