Production Readiness Checklist
Critical
Verify your deployment is secure and production-ready
Before You Deploy to Production
This checklist ensures your AWS deployment is secure, reliable, and follows best practices. Go through each section and verify all items before serving real traffic.
Security Assessment Summary
If you follow this documentation exactly, your deployment will have a solid security foundationsuitable for most production workloads. However, specific compliance requirements (HIPAA, PCI-DSS, SOC2) may require additional controls.
| Area | Status | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Network Isolation | Strong | VPC with private subnets, NAT Gateway |
| Container Security | Strong | Non-root user, minimal base image, health checks |
| Secrets Management | Strong | AWS Secrets Manager, no hardcoded credentials |
| IAM Permissions | Moderate | Requires manual review for least-privilege |
| Encryption | Strong | HTTPS via ALB, RDS encryption at rest |
| Monitoring | Basic | CloudWatch logs enabled, consider adding alarms |
| Item | Status | How to Verify |
|---|---|---|
| Root account MFA enabled | Required | IAM Console → Security credentials → MFA |
| IAM user MFA enabled | Required | IAM Console → Users → Security credentials |
| No root account access keys | Required | IAM Console → Security credentials → Delete if present |
| Least-privilege IAM policies | Required | Review policies, remove AdministratorAccess for production |
| ECS task roles configured | Required | Task definition has specific task role, not admin |
| GitHub Actions uses OIDC | Recommended | No long-lived AWS credentials in GitHub secrets |
Ready for Production
If you have checked all Required items in this checklist, your deployment is ready for production traffic. The Recommended items add additional reliability and security but are not strictly required.