Twelve Factor App
The Twelve Factor App is a methodology for building software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications that are scalable, maintainable, and portable across different environments. It outlines twelve principles or factors that guide developers in creating modern, cloud-native applications, focusing on aspects like configuration, dependencies, and deployment. This methodology emphasizes best practices for development, operations, and deployment to ensure applications run reliably in dynamic cloud environments.
Developers should learn and use the Twelve Factor App methodology when building scalable web applications, especially for cloud deployment, as it helps avoid common pitfalls and ensures consistency across development and production. It is particularly useful for microservices architectures, DevOps practices, and continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines, where portability and automation are critical. By following these principles, teams can improve application resilience, simplify scaling, and reduce environment-specific issues.