The 12-Factor App Building Methodology

1

Apache Tomcat

Example: Little Johnny was developing a Java web app and thinking about how he would configure Tomcat to listen to requests and redirect the data into his app... Until he remembered this would violate Factor 7! Instead, he decided to declare Jetty as a dependency, keeping the HTTP service inside the app instead of configuring an external web server and then injecting its functionalities. Now, whenever he wants to instantiate another server for this app, all he has to do is installing dependencies and running the app, isn't it convenient?

#Web And Application Servers #Application Server #Java 14 social mentions

2

Heroku

If you care just a little about technology you are aware of the plethora of different available (many of which quite similar) platforms, raising the need for portability of software products among them. Sometime in the quest for easily provisionable apps accross environments, from the first Makefile to the current orchestrated container, the 12-Factor Methodology was established (though a lot closer in time to the latter). Its notable principles are the use of declarative setup to facilitate provision automation (like a Dockerfile or Ansible playbook-based pipeline instead of a bash script defining each installation step in detail or a manual setup), a clean contract with the local environment to maximize portability, suitability for deployment in modern cloud platforms, minimum divergence between production & development instances, support for Continuous Deployment and upscaling without major changes to tooling, architecture or development practices. According to the 12 Factor website, this methodology was developed by Heroku employees, the current standard for Platform-as-a-Service cloud deployment solution, after a lot of competent observation on the problems of scaling, changing and porting web applications. Most of these recommendations are not confined to cloud-based web development, and many of them are quite intuitive; you probably have seen some of these advices if you followed coding tutorials on the web. However, these recommendations are influent, and now is a chance to think about the why of it.

#Cloud Computing #Cloud Hosting #VPS 71 social mentions