The BuiltForProd Standard
The BuiltForProd Standard defines what production-ready means: a system is built for production when it is Secure, Reliable, Observable, Scalable, Automated, Recoverable, Compliant and Operable. Each property is a design constraint, not a later upgrade, and each pillar page on this site names the units, services and workflows in the AWS Baseline and the blueprints that deliver it.
The eight pillars
| Pillar | A BuiltForProd system... | Page |
|---|---|---|
| Secure | protects identities, data, workloads and supply chains | Secure |
| Reliable | continues operating through expected failures | Reliable |
| Observable | makes its state and behavior visible to operators | Observable |
| Scalable | grows predictably without architectural failure | Scalable |
| Automated | makes routine provisioning, deployment, validation and operations repeatable | Automated |
| Recoverable | has tested recovery mechanisms for failures and disasters | Recoverable |
| Compliant | can demonstrate controls and evidence consistently | Compliant |
| Operable | can be understood, operated, troubleshot and changed safely by humans | Operable |
The BuiltForProd test
The test is one question, "Would you trust this in production?", asked eight ways:
| Dimension | Question |
|---|---|
| Security | Is it secure by default? |
| Reliability | What happens when something fails? |
| Observability | Can operators see what is happening? |
| Scalability | What happens when demand grows 10x? |
| Automation | How much depends on manual intervention? |
| Recovery | Can the system actually be restored? |
| Compliance | Can controls and evidence be demonstrated? |
| Operations | Can another engineer operate it safely? |
A demo passes none of these. A system that "works" answers only the first half of each question. The pillar pages answer all eight for the AWS Baseline and the three blueprints, with the concrete mechanism and how you verify it in your own accounts.
How the pillars map to the platform
Each pillar is delivered by several parts of the platform, and most parts serve more than one pillar. The table shows the principal mechanisms; the pillar pages hold the full lists.
| Pillar | Principal mechanisms in the AWS Baseline and blueprints |
|---|---|
| Secure | Three service control policies, IAM Identity Center with environment-scoped permission sets, keyless CI through GitHub OIDC, KMS encryption, SOPS-encrypted secrets, GuardDuty, Security Hub, Firewall Manager WAF, isolation-domain routing |
| Reliable | Three Availability Zones everywhere, one NAT Gateway per AZ, multi-AZ DocumentDB and Redis in staging and prod, ArgoCD high availability, horizontal pod autoscaler settings with disruption budgets, plan-before-apply with mocked dependencies |
| Observable | Organization CloudTrail, VPC Flow Logs, the CloudWatch observability sink in the security account, seven CIS metric filters and alarms, Fluent Bit application logs, X-Ray tracing |
| Scalable | A /8 address plan with room for 16 regions and 8 stages per region, IPAM, region discovery from folders, three layers of EKS scaling (pod autoscaler, Karpenter, Cluster Autoscaler), Spot runners that scale to zero |
| Automated | Plan on pull request, apply on merge, scheduled drift detection, pre-commit and CI guardrail scripts, immutable images promoted by pull request, secrets synced on merge |
| Recoverable | Versioned and locked state, DocumentDB automated backups and deletion protection in prod, S3 versioning, Git revert as rollback, promotion of a previous tag |
| Compliant | The SOC 2 baseline conformance pack, 28 further packs, Security Hub standards, an audit-protection SCP, log file validation, auditor permission sets that cannot read data |
| Operable | Workbooks and runbooks, CODEOWNERS by blast radius, twelve named roles, TODO: and @optional: tags, one switch file per concern with the price beside each switch |
How to read the pillar pages
Every pillar page has the same three parts: what the pillar means, what in the code delivers it, and how you verify it in your own accounts without changing anything. The architecture overview gives the map the pillar pages assume, and the security posture summary condenses the Secure and Compliant pillars for a reviewer.