Design Engineering-VI-The 12 (Twelve) Factor App

The cloud computing technologies becoming omni present and embraced by developer fraternity & development organizations after the initial apprehensions & reluctance about security, internet availability & speed, data ownership, development challenges arising out of changes in development platforms, methodology etc.

In the year 2012, when cloud technologies were in infancy, a methodology name 12 factor app was defined by the developers at Heroku for building cloud-native applications especially SaaS web apps. As per https://12factor.net/, its a methodology for building SaaS- Software-As-A Service apps.

Software-as- a service is ubiquitously the most popular model for software delivery over the internet and its growing by leaps & bounds with cloud computing fueling most of its growth & adoption.

One of the biggest driver for this methodology was about the users being able to simply access the applications via internet and at the same time, the developers will be free of the complex software & hardware management activities. The SaaS apps run on SaaS provider’s infrastructure and such providers manages everything from apps, security, scalability, availability and performance.

These SaaS apps are often called as on-demand software or web based software or hosted software. This is an entirely different world compared to the traditional software’s especially the non-hosted ones.

As this is beyond doubt, a paradigm change, the software building approaches, practices and processes also have to undergo major changes. The new terms are being introduced, some existing terms have been given different meaning and this is going to be happening in foreseeable future.

Switching to such model would have its own set of challenges and especially getting the developers to learn & collaborate.

There have been introduction of architecture & design practices well suited for such model and also there have been some attempts to provide some confirmatory framework / methodology where SasS builders can standardize the building practice and accelerate the velocity of building apps through addressing the common systemic challenges.

Here is what 12 factor app methodology had proposed to do.

Its certainly addressed the immediate challenges and laid foundations for the next practices to be born. e.g. DevOps, DevSecOps, CI/CD etc.,

The motivations behind this methodology were

• to raise the awareness of systemic problems
• to provide shared and standard vocabulary for these problems
• to offer conceptual solutions to those problems with accompanying terminology

The following diagram depicts these factors.

So far so good.

Happy Designing!!

Disclaimer: No copyright infringements are intended.

REFERENCES :

https://12factor.net/

https://vishvvas.wordpress.com/2022/05/01/saas-the-twelve-factor-app/