Project — Production Readiness Checklist

Relax. We'll talk through this in plain words — no textbook voice.

What you'll walk away with

Understand Project — Production Readiness Checklist without feeling intimidated by it
Get hands-on running the AWS CLI/Console yourself
Apply this concept immediately in a real project

Let's think about it this way for a moment

Being able to create resources on AWS doesn't mean you're 'production-ready' — you only earn that label once you've covered IAM least-privilege, encryption at rest/in transit, Multi-AZ high availability, Billing Alerts, CloudWatch monitoring/alarms, and a backup/snapshot policy. In this project, we'll write our own checklist and use it to audit Project 1/2.

Let's connect it to a real scenario

Manually check each checklist item in the AWS Console/CLI — is MFA enabled or not, is encryption enabled or not, is Multi-AZ configured or not, is a Billing Alert set up or not. Mark Pass/Fail for each item, and fix the config for anything that fails.

IAM least-privilege (no wildcard *), MFA enabled
Encryption at rest (S3/RDS/EBS) + in transit (HTTPS/TLS)
Multi-AZ high availability, Billing Alert + CloudWatch monitoring

Let's walk through it together

text

AWS Production Readiness Checklist
====================================
[ ] MFA enabled on all IAM users with console access
[ ] No IAM policy uses wildcard (*) unless truly required
[ ] Encryption at rest enabled (S3 bucket, RDS, EBS volumes)
[ ] All public endpoints use HTTPS/TLS
[ ] RDS is Multi-AZ (production databases)
[ ] Auto Scaling Group has min >= 2 (no single point of failure)
[ ] Billing alert / budget configured
[ ] CloudWatch alarms on critical metrics (CPU, error rate, DB connections)
[ ] CloudTrail enabled for audit logging
[ ] Resources tagged (project, environment, owner) for cost tracking

You should see

You'll audit Project 1/2 with the checklist and end up with fixed configs for any items that failed.

Try it in 5 minutes

Run the checklist above against every resource in Project 1 (Three-Tier Web App) — find each item that fails and fix it.

A quick word of caution

This checklist is just a starting point — a real production environment (depending on compliance requirements and company policy) may need a much broader checklist, like the full AWS Well-Architected Review framework.

Easy traps

Stopping at writing the checklist as 'documentation' — never actually going back and applying the fixes to the resources
Declaring 'production-ready' the moment every checklist item passes, while completely leaving out a disaster recovery plan/runbook

Now try it yourself

Run the checklist above against every resource in Project 1 (Three-Tier Web App) — find each item that fails and fix it.

You'll know it worked when: You'll audit Project 1/2 with the checklist and end up with fixed configs for any items that failed.