Exa Production Readiness Gate

Overview

Gate an Exa-backed service on contract, security, cost, reliability, observability, and rollback evidence. Treat credentials, queries, retrieved content, generated output, spend, and destructive state as separately governed boundaries.

Prerequisites

• The target repository, environment, Exa team, product surface, and accountable owner.
• The workload's data classification, latency and freshness promise, cost ceiling, and retention policy.
• Current first-party documentation plus credentials only for a narrowly approved live check.

Current Contract

Production readiness spans the chosen Exa product, not just connectivity. Search and Contents require content and freshness controls; Agent, Monitors, Websets, and Batch add asynchronous state; webhooks add signature and replay handling; every paid surface needs a budget owner.

Authentication

For normal REST work, inject EXA_API_KEY from an approved server-side secret manager and send it only as Authorization: Bearer to the configured first-party Exa API host. Team Management service keys, hosted MCP OAuth or enterprise managed authorization, and payment-protocol calls are separate trust models. Never print, commit, place in a URL, or expose a credential to an untrusted client.