Our DevOps checklist before a client goes live

A launch date is not a reason to skip steps. Before any client project goes live, we run the same short list regardless of how small the project is: automated tests gating every deploy, staged rollouts instead of one-shot releases, and alerting configured before the first real user shows up, not after. Rollback plans get tested in staging, not just documented. A rollback plan nobody has run is a plan that fails the first time it's needed. This checklist has caught more problems in code review than in production, which is exactly the point.