Inklings: a tumblelog

The Twelve-Factor App

In the modern era, software is commonly delivered as a service: called web apps, or software-as-a-service. The twelve-factor app is a methodology for building software-as-a-service apps that:

  • Use declarative formats for setup automation, to minimize time and cost for new developers joining the project;
  • Have a clean contract with the underlying operating system, offering maximum portability between execution environments;
  • Are suitable for deployment on modern cloud platforms, obviating the need for servers and systems administration;
  • Minimize divergence between development and production, enabling continuous deployment for maximum agility;
  • And can scale up without significant changes to tooling, architecture, or development practices.

The twelve-factor methodology can be applied to apps written in any programming language, and which use any combination of backing services (database, queue, memory cache, etc).

[…]

The Twelve Factors

  1. Codebase: One codebase tracked in revision control, many deploys
  2. Dependencies: Explicitly declare and isolate dependencies
  3. Config: Store config in the environment
  4. Backing Services: Treat backing services as attached resources
  5. Build, release, run: Strictly separate build and run stages
  6. Processes: Execute the app as one or more stateless processes
  7. Port binding: Export services via port binding
  8. Concurrency: Scale out via the process model
  9. Disposability: Maximize robustness with fast startup and graceful shutdown
  10. Dev/prod parity: Keep development, staging, and production as similar as possible
  11. Logs: Treat logs as event streams
  12. Admin processes: Run admin/management tasks as one-off processes

All solid stuff. Go read the site for details. The Hacker News commentary is also good.