A maintenance checklist for production software

Launching is the start of a system’s working life, not the end of the project. Dependencies age, certificates expire, traffic patterns change and people leave. A short, regular routine keeps small issues small.

Use this checklist as a starting point and adapt it to your system.

Every month

• Apply dependency and security updates. Review what is outdated, read the release notes for anything risky, and update in small batches so a problem is easy to trace.
• Check backups. Confirm that backups ran and that they cover everything you would need: databases, uploaded files and configuration.
• Review monitoring and alerts. Look at errors, slow pages and failed jobs. If an alert fires often and nobody acts on it, fix the alert or the cause.
• Check certificates and domains. Note expiry dates for certificates, domain registrations and API keys before they become an outage.

Every quarter

• Test a restore. A backup you have never restored is an assumption. Restore it into a separate environment and confirm the application works.
• Review access. Remove accounts, keys and permissions that are no longer needed. People change roles and suppliers change, and old access tends to stay.
• Review performance. Compare load times and resource use with the previous quarter and investigate any drift.
• Review costs. Look for unused servers, oversized plans and forgotten services.

Every year

• Plan upgrades. Identify major versions of the language, framework and database that are approaching the end of support, and schedule the work before it becomes urgent.
• Review the architecture. Ask whether the system still fits how the business works, and write down what you would change.
• Rehearse an incident. Walk through who is told, who decides and how a rollback is done. A rehearsed plan is much calmer than an improvised one.

Keep it written down

Document the routine, the owner of each item and where the evidence lives. Maintenance that depends on one person’s memory stops when that person is unavailable.

If you would rather not carry this routine yourself, support and maintenance is part of what we do at Kodaura. Tell us what you run and we will describe how we would look after it.