What Exactly is “Production Ready” in 2025?

Nine years ago, I wrote about what “production ready” really means. At the time, I used the analogy of a coffee cup: just because it holds 8 ounces of hot liquid without burning your hand doesn’t mean it’s ready for the realities of your commute.

That point still holds—but the world we’re shipping software into has changed.

In 2016, the concern was whether the cup had a lid and a sleeve. In 2025, we need to ask if the cup is made from sustainable materials (governance), can be microwaved (resilience), and fits in the car’s oddly shaped cupholder (integration). The metaphor maps directly to modern enterprise challenges.

Production Ready ≠ Minimum Viable Product

The confusion between production ready and minimum viable product (MVP) persists.

An MVP is a pilot asking, “Can this work?”
A production-ready system is a commitment that answers, “This will work, at scale, under pressure.”

The former tests a hypothesis; the latter runs a business process. Both have value, but the expectations are very different.

It’s Still About the Use Case

Just like the coffee cup, readiness depends on context. A SaaS application that’s fine for a 10-person startup may buckle at the scale of a Fortune 500 enterprise.

For modern IT, that means asking:

• Resilience – Does it fail gracefully, with redundancy and recovery built in?

• Security – Does it meet the zero-trust posture I need today, not yesterday?

• Integration – Can it play nice with the dozens of platforms already in my stack?

• Governance – Can my non-infrastructure teams use it without violating compliance or cost guardrails?

• Operability – Is this manageable by a platform team? Or does it require a dedicated priesthood of specialists to babysit it? If my platform engineers can’t easily integrate it into their internal developer platform, its operational cost will skyrocket, and it’s not truly production ready.

If those use cases aren’t met, the solution may still be innovative, but it’s not production ready.

The New Litmus Test: AI and Platforms

Today, many vendors are racing to ship AI features. But “AI-enabled” doesn’t mean “production ready.”

If your AI-powered ticketing system generates hallucinated answers in front of end users, it’s not production ready.
If your infrastructure “automation fabric” requires heroic efforts from engineers just to install, it’s not production ready.

Production ready today means safe defaults, tested integrations, and predictable outcomes. It doesn’t mean perfect, but it does mean “enterprise usable.”

Why This Still Matters

Nine years ago, I said:

“I’m not an analyst. I don’t intake a vendor’s feature list and tick off the boxes. I put this stuff in the lab and put myself in the shoes of an end user.”

That’s still how I measure production readiness. Analysts can debate checklists. Practitioners are the ones who pay the price when “MVP” gets mistaken for “ready for prime time.”

The coffee cup analogy holds, but the vehicle has changed. We’re not just commuting anymore; we’re navigating a high-speed, multi-lane highway with autonomous vehicles (AI) and complex traffic management systems (platforms). The price for spilling coffee isn’t just a stained shirt—it’s a multi-car pile-up.

You want to know if your solution is production-ready? Have Virtual CTO Advisor assess your readiness. You can ask three questions without registering, and currently, registration is free, and you get to ask as many questions as you’d like.