Twelve-Factor App

Noun · Development

Definitions

  1. A methodology of twelve principles for building modern cloud-native applications, published by Heroku co-founder Adam Wiggins in 2011. Key factors: store config in environment variables, treat backing services as attached resources, use stateless processes, separate build/run stages, and achieve dev/prod parity. Still relevant 15 years later.

    In plain English: Twelve rules for building applications that work well in the cloud, covering things like configuration, logging, and statelessness.

    Example: "The app violates factor #3 (config) by hardcoding the database URL and factor #6 (processes) by storing sessions in local memory."

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