What is a production readiness checklist?

It is a list of operational and reliability requirements a service must meet before it serves real traffic. It typically covers health checks, auth, observability, rate limiting, failure handling, and an on-call runbook so the team knows the service can run safely in production.

Why does a service need a health endpoint?

Load balancers and orchestrators like Kubernetes poll a health endpoint to decide whether to route traffic to an instance. Without it, the platform cannot detect a hung or starting instance and may send requests to a process that cannot serve them.

What is a graceful shutdown and why does it matter?

Graceful shutdown means the service stops accepting new requests, finishes in-flight work, and closes connections before exiting. It prevents dropped requests and corrupted state during deploys, scale-downs, and rolling restarts.

Do I need a circuit breaker for every dependency?

Not always, but any synchronous call to a remote dependency that can slow down or fail should be protected. A circuit breaker stops a failing dependency from exhausting your threads or cascading the outage to callers upstream.

Is my checklist data sent anywhere?

No. The builder assembles the checklist entirely in your browser from the items you toggle. Nothing is uploaded, so you can draft readiness reviews for unreleased internal services safely.

What is the New Microservice Launch Checklist Builder?

Generates a pre-launch checklist for microservices covering health endpoint, auth, logging, metrics, rate limiting, circuit breaker, graceful shutdown, and runbook. Toggle the items you need and copy the markdown. It runs free in your browser on Gera Tools, with nothing uploaded.

New Microservice Launch Checklist Builder

Name: New Microservice Launch Checklist Builder
Creator: Gera Tools
License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

The New Microservice Launch Checklist Builder turns the messy, easy-to-forget work of shipping a service into a structured pre-launch list. A microservice that compiles is not the same as a microservice that survives production — it needs health checks, auth, observability, failure handling, and a runbook. This tool assembles a readiness checklist you can paste into a launch ticket and tick off item by item.

Why production readiness checklists matter

Post-mortems on microservice outages repeatedly cluster around a small set of root causes: a service that had no health endpoint and so received traffic before it finished starting; an endpoint left open without authentication in the rush to ship; structured logs missing request IDs so a multi-hop trace is impossible to reconstruct; a dependency that slowed down and exhausted the service’s thread pool because there was no circuit breaker. A checklist does not prevent all incidents, but it systematically blocks the ones caused by omission — and in a microservices architecture, those cascade.

The eight categories

The builder organises readiness requirements into eight domains:

Health endpoint — A /health (or /readiness//liveness) route that returns 200 when the service is ready. Load balancers and orchestrators like Kubernetes need this to know when to route traffic. The endpoint must be exempt from authentication so the platform can check it without credentials.

Authentication and authorization — Every external endpoint validates tokens or API keys. Internal endpoints use service-to-service identity (mTLS or JWT). No unauthenticated endpoints except health and intentionally public routes.

Structured logging — JSON log lines with a request ID, trace ID, service name, and severity. Without a request ID, correlating logs across services during an incident is guesswork.

Metrics — A /metrics endpoint (Prometheus format) or equivalent push sink, emitting at minimum: request rate, error rate, and P95/P99 latency. These three form the RED method that most alerting rules rely on.

Rate limiting — Public-facing endpoints protected by per-client or per-IP rate limits to prevent runaway callers from exhausting capacity.

Circuit breaker — Any synchronous call to a remote dependency should be wrapped to fail fast when that dependency is slow or down, preventing cascading failures.

Graceful shutdown — On SIGTERM the service stops accepting new requests, finishes in-flight work, and closes connections. Rolling deployments and scale-downs drop requests without this.

Runbook — A linked document covering: what does this service do, what are its dependencies, how do you restart it, what does a healthy vs unhealthy state look like, and where are the logs and dashboards.

How the builder works

Enter your service name, toggle the categories that apply, and the tool generates a GitHub/GitLab-compatible markdown checklist with - [ ] items per category. Each item is a concrete, verifiable action, not a vague intention.

For a service named payments-api, the output includes entries such as:

## payments-api — Production Readiness

### Health
- [ ] GET /health returns 200 and is exempt from auth middleware
- [ ] Readiness probe verified in staging with a simulated slow DB

### Shutdown
- [ ] SIGTERM drains in-flight requests before process exits
- [ ] Tested: rolling deploy in staging completes with zero 5xx

Using it as a gate

The highest-value use is treating unchecked critical items as hard launch blockers — not soft suggestions. Paste the checklist into the launch PR description so reviewers see which items remain open and the conversation focuses on resolving them before merge. Assign the runbook to a named owner on day one; a runbook without an owner goes stale within weeks.