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Microservice Launch Checklist

Extract or launch a service without distributed-monolith regret: contracts, observability, failure modes, ownership.

9 steps · 9 required · last reviewed (next review 2027-03-19) · updated 2026-09-21

Related focus areas:DevOpsObservability EngineeringPlatform Engineering

Roadmaps covering the same ground:Cloud Cost OptimizationDevSecOps RolloutObservability MaturityPlatform Engineering AdoptionProduction-Ready KubernetesSRE Adoption

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A microservice earns its overhead only if it can be deployed independently, fail independently, and be debugged independently. This checklist is the gate before the first production traffic.

If three or more boxes stay unchecked, the honest move is usually: do not split the service yet. A distributed monolith has the costs of both architectures and the benefits of neither.

  1. API contract is versioned and documented (OpenAPI/protobuf), breaking changes have a policy

    required

    Without a contract, every consumer deploy is coupled to every provider deploy — the monolith returns with network hops.

  2. Service has an owner (team) and an on-call story

    required

    An owned-by-everyone service is owned by no one and pages no one who can fix it.

  3. Failure of this service degrades, not breaks, its callers (timeouts, retries, circuit breakers)

    required

    In distributed systems, the network will fail; whether that becomes an outage is decided by the caller's timeout policy.

  4. Distributed tracing works across service boundaries with correlation IDs

    required

    Debugging a 5-service request path without tracing is archaeology; with it, it's a query.

  5. Independent deployment is proven — deployed alone, callers unaffected

    required

    If the service cannot ship without a synchronized deploy of others, it is not a service; it is a module with latency.

  6. Data ownership is clean: its own store, no shared tables with other services

    required

    A shared database is the strongest possible coupling — schema, availability, and scaling all fuse back together.

  7. Idempotency is handled for retries and at-least-once delivery

    required

    Retries are guaranteed; duplicate side effects (double charges, double sends) are a design decision, not luck.

  8. SLOs are defined and alerting pages on symptoms users feel

    required

    Page on burn rate, not on CPU; alerting on internals trains people to ignore alerts.

  9. Local development story is documented (run it without 12 other services)

    required

    Onboarding friction compounds: if it takes a day to run the service, every change is expensive forever.

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Checklists document self-reported practice. Items were last reviewed 2026-09-19 — adapt them to your own environment.