Pre-deployment review for a new VM or container

Run this before declaring any new VM “production ready”. Each item is a check that the workload is operationally sound, not just running.

Why this matters

A VM that wasn’t set up correctly is a future incident. The cost of running this checklist (10-15 minutes) is small compared to the cost of debugging a forgotten backup or undocumented HA decision in the middle of an outage.