The Core Operational Readiness Checklist
Shipping software isn't the only hard part.Keeping it running at 2:00 AM—when a dependency fails, a deployment misbehaves, or a customer reports a broken state—is where operational readiness really matters.Most deployment checklists focus entirely on code quality and CI/CD pipelines. They rarely address the operational concerns that emerge after deployment. The Core Operational Readiness Checklist is a free, 18-point baseline designed to help engineering teams answer one simple question before every release:"Can this service be diagnosed, supported, and recovered in production?"### What's InsideThe checklist is organized around four core operational pillars:* Observability: Error code mapping, dynamic log levels, correlation IDs, and health probes.* Resilience: Timeout ceilings, dependency mapping, graceful degradation, and failure recovery.* Supportability: Runbooks, operational documentation, ownership boundaries, and defect tracking.* Deployment Safety: Secrets management, backward-compatible database changes, smoke testing, and rollback planning.Each checkpoint follows a simple, actionable framework—**Risk → Requirement → Validation**—making it easy to adapt to your own engineering standards and review processes.### Why Markdown?This checklist is intentionally published as a raw Markdown (`.md`) document. That means you can:* Commit it to Git.* Drop it into Notion, Obsidian, or your internal wiki.* Customize it for your team's specific standards.* Version it alongside your engineering documentation.* Use it directly during architecture and release reviews.It's designed to be a living engineering document—not a static PDF.---This checklist is the first publication in the Operational Engineering Playbooks series and serves as the baseline for the upcoming Foundation Series workbooks.Enter $0 to download it for free, or choose to support the project if you find it useful.
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