Project — Production Readiness Checklist

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

What you'll walk away with

Get comfortable with Project — Production Readiness Checklist, no intimidation required
Be able to run terraform commands and HCL code yourself
Apply this concept immediately in a real project

Let's think about this for a second

Just because a config applies doesn't mean it's 'production-ready' — you need a remote backend with state locking, sensitive variables marked, provider versions pinned, a `.gitignore` covering state files/credentials, reusable modules, and CI/CD validate/plan steps, all in place, before you can really call it production-ready. In this project, we'll write our own checklist and use it to audit Projects 1 and 2.

Let's connect this to a real scenario

Go through the checklist item by item against a config folder manually — is a remote backend configured or not, are sensitive variables marked or not, does `.gitignore` cover state/tfvars or not — mark each item Pass/Fail, and for anything that fails, go fix the config.

Remote backend with state locking is configured
Sensitive variables are marked with sensitive = true
Provider versions are pinned, and state/tfvars are covered in .gitignore

Let's look at an example

text

Production Readiness Checklist
================================
[ ] Remote backend configured (not local state)
[ ] State locking enabled (e.g. DynamoDB table for S3 backend)
[ ] All sensitive variables marked sensitive = true
[ ] Provider versions pinned (required_providers with version constraint)
[ ] .gitignore excludes *.tfstate, *.tfvars (except .tfvars.example)
[ ] Modules used for anything deployed to more than one environment
[ ] CI/CD runs terraform fmt -check, validate, and plan on every PR
[ ] No hardcoded credentials anywhere in .tf files

You should see

You'll have audited Projects 1 and 2 against the checklist and produced a fixed config for anything that failed.

Try it in 5 minutes

Run the checklist above against every config folder in Project 1 (Web App Infrastructure) — identify every item that fails and go fix it.

A quick word of caution

This checklist is just a starting point — a real production environment (depending on compliance requirements and team conventions) may need a broader checklist covering things like tagging policy and cost budget alerts.

Easy traps

Treating the checklist as a piece of 'documentation' and stopping there — never actually going back and fixing the config and re-applying
Declaring 'production-ready' as soon as every checklist item passes, while completely ignoring cost monitoring/alerting setup

Now try it yourself

Run the checklist above against every config folder in Project 1 (Web App Infrastructure) — identify every item that fails and go fix it.

You'll know it worked when: You'll have audited Projects 1 and 2 against the checklist and produced a fixed config for anything that failed.