Describe the workload
Record expected users, request patterns, storage growth and external dependencies. Distinguish ordinary demand from short peaks. Choose infrastructure around the workload and team capacity; adopting more services can increase the amount of operational work.
Separate environments and credentials
Identify development, staging and production environments. Decide who can deploy and change configuration. Keep secrets outside source control, define how they rotate and document the minimum access needed by each service.
Rehearse failure and recovery
Define acceptable downtime and data loss with the business owner. Take backups and test a restoration into an isolated environment. A successful backup job does not establish that the application can be recovered. Record rollback steps for failed releases.
Make operations visible
Choose health checks and alerts that indicate a user-facing problem. Assign an owner and escalation route to each actionable alert. Include logs, cost monitoring, update responsibilities and deployment instructions in the handover.
Bring this to your project brief.
- Workload and dependency inventory
- Environment and access requirements
- Recovery objectives and named operational owners
Use general descriptions or anonymized examples. Do not put credentials, personal records or confidential documents into the brief.
Prepare your project brief