reliability-checklist

name	reliability-checklist
description	Production readiness verification for services and infrastructure. Use before promoting a service to production, after significant infrastructure changes, or during periodic production readiness reviews.
license	MIT

Reliability Checklist

Verify production readiness of a service or infrastructure change.

When to Use

The production-readiness gate before promoting a service — a pass/fail audit of operational readiness: resource limits, health/readiness probes, fault tolerance, graceful degradation, right-sizing. It does not instrument the service (building the logs/metrics/alerts is observability-setup) and does not cover network-boundary correctness (that's distributed-systems-checklist). This is the operational go/no-go, not the telemetry or the wire protocol.

Checklist

1. Resource limits: CPU and memory limits set on all containers/VMs. No unbounded resource consumption.
2. Health checks: Liveness and readiness probes configured. Restart policy defined.
3. Fault tolerance: Single points of failure identified and mitigated (replication, failover, load balancing).
4. Graceful degradation: Service behaves predictably under partial failure (upstream down, DB slow).
5. Right-sizing: Resources allocated based on actual usage data, not estimates. Review after first week of production load.

Completion

• All 5 checklist items verified with evidence (command output, config snippet)
• Findings reported: pass/fail per item with remediation for failures

Anti-Patterns

• Rubber-stamping — checking boxes without verifying actual state
• Skipping right-sizing — over-provisioning wastes resources, under-provisioning causes outages
• One-time check — reliability must be re-verified after significant changes