Cloud native Fifteen Factor Apps

Background

A few years back Heroku published a set of guidelines for building and deploying applications which became known as 12 Factor App. These are guiding principles for developing, operating and deploying Web apps or software-as-a-service (SaaS). Over a period of time, as cloud adoption increased and microservices became popular there are additional factors which got added. We also saw changes in the application integration space with more real-time processing gaining popularity. We now have event driven microservices which empower organisations to leverage data to get more value using event driven architecture.

15 Factor Apps series

In order to understand the 15 factors better, I am creating this series of YouTube videos. We will cover all the 15 factors in different parts. Below is the picture showing the initial 12 factors as described in the 12Factor.net and then we also have the next picture showing the additional 3 factors as part of the 15 factors.

Here is a list of 15 Factors which help to make the modern cloud-native applications highly scalable, resilient and portable:

Codebase - one codebase tracked in version control, many deploys
Dependencies - Explicitly declare and isolate dependencies
Config - store config in environment
Backing services - treat backing service as an attached resource
Build, release and run - strictly separate build and run phases
Processes - execute app as one or more stateless processes
Port binding - expose services via port binding
Concurrency - scale-out via process model
Disposability - maximize robustness with fast startup and graceful shutdown
Dev/Prod parity - keep development, staging and production as similar as possible
Logs - treat logs as stream of events
Admin processes - Run admin/management tasks as one-off process
API first - define service contract
Telemetry - monitor process performance
Authentication - secure applications across hardware, network and software layers