Spring Boot Production-Ready Checklist (2026)

Shipping a Spring Boot service is easy. Keeping it fast, secure and operable at three in the morning is the hard part. This is the checklist I walk through before a rollout — condensed from services I have taken to production on Kubernetes over the last few years, currently on Spring Boot 4 and Java 25. It is deliberately not a list of everything you could do. It is the set of things whose absence has cost me, or a team I worked with, an incident.