Twelve Factor App
30 May 2020What is Twelev-factor app?
The Twelve app evolved from the experiences of engineers at Heroku. It is a list of patterns that are used in cloud-native application architetures.
It is important to note that every single microservice is an app (that is independently deployable).
Maintain One Codebase
Antipatterns are opposite of design patterns. Maintaining one codebase for each app that can be deployed.
Explicit Declaration of dependencies
“All dependencies must be explicitly declared and isolated, making it easy to configure and change dependencies. “ - (Mastering Spring 5)
For java application where a maven pom/xml file is used for maintaining all your dependencies.
Application configuration stored in an environment
Irrespective of the mechanism that’s used, we recommend that you do the following:
- Manage configuration outside the application code (independent of the application’s deployable unit)
- Use a standardized way of configuration
Having a centralised repository for application configuration should be considered.
All dependencies are treated as backing services
“A backing service is any service that an application accesses over the network—an external application, an external database, or an email server.” - (Mastering Spring 5)
Clear separation between build, release, and run phases
Build: Creates an executable bundle (EAR, WAR, or JAR) from code, as well as dependencies that can be deployed to multiple environments Release: Combines the executable bundle with a specific environment configuration to deploy in an environment Run: Runs the app in an execution environment using a specific release
Applications do not store states – stateless
Application do not store any data within the session. All data will be saved to a datastore. Antipatterns is a sticky session.
All the services are exposed with port binding
A Twelve-Factor App exposes all the services using port binding. While it is possible to have other mechanisms to expose services, these mechanisms are implementation-dependent. Port binding gives full control of receiving and handling messages, irrespective of where an app is deployed.
Possibility to scale horizontally – concurrency
Scaling vertically has it limits. Scaling horizontally has its opportunities without limits.
Each application instance is disposable
A Twelve-Factor App should do the following:
Have a minimum startup time. A long startup time means a long delay before an application can take requests. Shut down gracefully. Handle hardware failures gracefully.
Acheiving environmental parity - all environments are the same
All the environments, that is, development, test, staging, and production, should be similar. They should use the same processes and tools.
Treating all logs as event streams
Visibility is critical to a Twelve-Factor App. Since applications are deployed on the Cloud and are automatically scaled, it is important that you have a centralized view of what’s happening across different instances of the applications.
No distinction for admin processes
Twelve-Factor Apps treat administrative tasks (migrations, scripts, and so on) in a similar way to normal application processes.