Over a decade ago, Heroku co-founder Adam Wiggins published the Twelve-Factor App methodology as a way to codify the best practices for writing SaaS applications. In that time, cloud-native has become the default for all new applications, and technologies like Kubernetes are widespread. Best-practices for software have evolved, and we believe that Twelve-Factor also needs to evolve — this time with you, the community.
Originally, the Twelve-Factor manifesto focused on building deployable applications without thinking about deployment, and while its core concepts are still remarkably relevant, the examples are another story. Industry practices have evolved considerably and many of the examples reflect outdated practices. Rather than help illustrate the concepts, these outdated examples make the concepts look obsolete.
It is time to modernize Twelve-Factor for the next decade of technological advancements.
Like art restoration, the majority of the work will first focus on removing accumulated cruft so that the original intent can shine through. For the first step in the restoration, we plan to remove the references to outdated technology and update the examples to reflect modern industry practices. Next, we plan to clearly separate the core concepts from the examples. This will make it easier to evolve the examples in the future without disturbing the timeless philosophy at the core of the manifesto. Just like how microservices are a set of separate services that are loosely coupled together so they can be updated independently, we’re applying this same thinking to Twelve-Factor so the specifications can be separate from examples and reference implementations.
While we originally wrote Twelve-Factor on our own, it’s now time that we define and implement these principles with the community — taking lessons that we’ve all learned from building and operating modern apps and systems and sharing them. Let’s do this together, email to join twelve-factor@googlegroups.com and tag #12factor (X / LinkedIn) or @heroku when you publish blogs with your perspectives and ideas!
We look forward to working together to make the new version of the manifesto awesome!