Service Onboarding Principles

A new service should not be considered production-ready merely because its container starts.

Minimum governance checks

• The service has a documented purpose and owner.
• Dependencies, data paths, and failure impact are understood.
• Secrets are stored outside committed configuration.
• Persistent data and backup expectations are defined.
• Reverse proxy, DNS, authentication, and monitoring requirements are reviewed.
• Restore and rollback expectations are documented before launch.
• The service has a README covering purpose, ports, mounts, dependencies, backups, restore steps, and proxy/DNS behavior.
• Acceptance testing is completed and recorded.

Publication boundary

Public documentation may describe the checklist and decision process. It must not publish the live environment's exact hostnames, addresses, credentials, internal storage paths, firewall rules, or recovery commands.

Definition of done

A service is ready only when it is deployed, monitored, documented, recoverable, and assigned an owner.