Are you ready to go to prod on AWS? Use this checklist to find out.

You just built your amazing new app. It’s going to change everything. But first, you need to deploy it to AWS. How, exactly, do you do that?

It turns out there are quite a few steps. Several hundred, in fact. And you’ve probably missed a few. For example:

  1. Did you remember to encrypt all your application secrets, or do you have a database password or API key sitting around in plain text somewhere?
  2. Are your databases backed up? How do you know? I mean, have you actually tried recovering from one of those backups?
  3. Does every dev on your team share a single EC2 KeyPair to SSH to servers? What are you going to do if one of those devs leaves the company?
  4. Are you using IAM roles with your EC2 Instances? Did you remember to lock down the EC2 Metadata endpoint so only root can access it?
  5. Are your Instances running in an ASG, with ELB health checks enabled, deployed across multiple AZs, in private subnets, protected by NACLs?

I bet at least a few of you cringed when reading some of the items above. Perhaps you cringed at all of them. And more than a few of you probably felt like this:

Well, we have a solution for you. At Gruntwork, we’ve helped hundreds of companies go live on AWS by taking them through a comprehensive checklist. Today, we’re happy to share the checklist with all of you:

The Production Readiness Checklist for AWS

This checklist is your guide to the best practices for deploying secure, scalable, and highly available infrastructure in AWS. It covers a range of topics, including server-side apps, client-side apps, continuous integration, continuous delivery, architecture, security, monitoring, and everything else you need to take advantage of modern DevOps and cloud-native practices. Before you go live, go through each item, and make sure you haven’t missed anything important!

Oh, and if all of this infrastructure work is feeling a bit overwhelming, remember the words of Douglas Adams: Don’t Panic. Creating a production-ready infrastructure is a lot of work, but we’ve got you covered. Just about everything in the checklist is already part of the Gruntwork Infrastructure as Code Library and can be deployed in your AWS account in 1 day as part of the Reference Architecture.

So go get started with the checklist and get your apps live!

Your entire infrastructure. Defined as code. In about a day. Gruntwork.io.