productionready

Production-ready is a designation for software, services, or infrastructure that is prepared for deployment and operation in a live production environment. It implies that the artifact meets defined criteria for reliability, performance, security, operability, and maintainability, and that processes exist to support ongoing operation and evolution.

Core criteria typically include reliability and availability (consistent uptime, fault isolation, and recovery), performance and scalability (predictable latency, handling of expected load), security and compliance (vulnerability management, access controls, data protection, auditability), observability (metrics, logs, tracing that support rapid troubleshooting), and deployment readiness (versioned artifacts, automated CI/CD pipelines, support for safe rollout strategies such as canaries or blue-green deployments). Additional requirements cover configuration and state management (infrastructure as code, environment parity), data management (migrations, backups, retention), and incident readiness (runbooks, on-call coverage, incident response plans). Change management (clear change control, rollbacks) and governance/documentation (architecture decisions, support contacts) are also commonly part of the standard.

Process aspects include conducting readiness reviews or go/no-go gates before release, typically with involvement from SRE or DevOps teams, and staging environments that closely resemble production. Ongoing improvements are driven by post-incident reviews and feedback, with emphasis on reducing risk and increasing stability.

Common pitfalls involve insufficient production-like testing, inadequate monitoring, missing or outdated runbooks, unclear rollback plans, and brittle automation. Production-ready artifacts are designed to support reliable operation, rapid recovery, and controlled evolution in production.