Chapter 39: Production Readiness Checklist

gRPC Production Checklist

• ☐ TLS enabled (never plaintext in production)
• ☐ Deadlines set on all client calls
• ☐ Health check service implemented
• ☐ Retry policy configured (with backoff)
• ☐ Keepalive configured (prevent idle connection drops)
• ☐ Max message size set (default 4MB, increase if needed)
• ☐ Interceptors for: logging, metrics, tracing, auth
• ☐ Graceful shutdown (drain connections before stopping)
• ☐ Connection pooling (reuse channels, don't create per-RPC)
• ☐ Load balancing configured (L7 or client-side round_robin)
• ☐ Rate limiting (protect from overload)
• ☐ Circuit breaker (stop calling failing dependencies)
• ☐ Proto backward compatibility checked (buf breaking)
• ☐ Server reflection enabled (for debugging with grpcurl)
• ☐ Compression enabled for large messages

Mark as Complete