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Heroku Open Sources the Twelve-Factor App Definition

Today, we are excited to announce Twelve-Factor is now an open source project. This is a special moment in the journey of Twelve-Factor over the years. Published over a decade ago by Heroku co-founder Adam Wiggins to codify the best practices for writing SaaS apps, the ideas espoused on that website inspired many generations of software engineers.

Open sourcing 12-Factor is an important milestone to take the industry forward and codify best practices for the future. As the modern app architecture reflected in the 12-Factors became mainstream, new technologies and ideas emerged, and we needed to bring more voices and experiences to the discussion.

Vish Abrams Chief Architect, Heroku by Salesforce

We’re open sourcing Twelve-Factor because the principles were always meant to serve the broader software community, not just one company. Over time, SaaS went from a growing area of software delivery to the dominant distribution method for software and IaaS has overtaken data centers for infrastructure. The cloud is now the default.

At the same time the technology landscape changed. Containers and Kubernetes have done to the application layer what virtual machines did to servers and have spawned huge ecosystems and communities of their own focused on a new layer of app and infrastructure abstraction.

With these in mind, we looked at how to drive Twelve-Factor forward; to be even more relevant in the decades to come. Collectively we in the industry, end users and vendors, have learned so much from running apps and systems at scale over the past decade and it’s this collective knowledge that we need to codify to help the next wave of app teams be successful, faster, more easily. This movement is bigger than one company and to open it to an industry conversation, we are open sourcing it.

When I wrote Twelve Factor nearly 14 years ago, I never would have guessed these principles would remain relevant for so long, but cloud and backends have changed a lot since 2011! So it makes sense to turn Twelve-Factor into a community-maintained document that can evolve over time.

Adam Wiggins Heroku Founder, now GM of Platform at The Browser Company

What does this mean for Heroku? We will continue to support Twelve-Factor as part of the community. The Heroku platform has always been an implementation of the Twelve-Factors to make the act of building and deploying apps easier, and this will continue to be the case as the Twelve-Factors evolves; Heroku will evolve.

We invite you to get to know the project vision, meet the maintainers, and participate in the project. Read more about the project and community on the Twelve-Factor blog.

Originally published: November 12, 2024

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