Fifteen Factor App

In the continuously evolving world of technology, the most pressing requirement for any software development is to have the application performant, scalable, easily manageable, and resilient. In 2012, programmers at Heroku debuted the Twelve-Factor app methodology that states the General Principles and Guidelines for creating robust Enterprise Applications.

Modern application architectures are very complex and the containerized approach of hosting Cloud Native applications, especially the microservices architecture, makes the complete environment highly dynamic. Though Twelve-factor app principles are equally effective today and do align with the changing environment, but need to have extensions to these principles is felt.

This article focuses on the additional factors that are pretty much in force and are highly discussed across the industry now-a-days.

The Methodology - Fifteen Factor App

Fifteen Factors are an extension and suggested additions to the twelve factors that support the modern application architectures. Looking at the complexity and architectural changes witnessed in modern applications, existing layout principles are being elaborated further and the key suggested factor additions are as below –

• API First Approach
• Telemetry
• Security (Authentication and Authorization)

The methodology remains aligned with the principles suggested in core Twelve-Factor App methodology with an extension to additional factors –

• Use Declarative Formats for setup automation, to minimize time and cost for new developers joining the project
• Have a Clean Contract, offering maximum portability between execution environments
• Are suitable for deployment on modern Cloud Platforms, obviating the need for servers and systems administration
• Minimize Divergence between development and production, enabling continuous deployment for maximum agility
• Dynamically Scalable without significant changes to tooling, architecture, or development practices.
• Service-Driven Approach – Availability of the contract to be consumed by a Front-end client application, routing gateway, or any other downstream system
• Monitoring the distributed applications deployments for domain/application-specific logs/data, health information, or more statistics on modern cloud platforms
• Security (Authentication and Authorization) is addressed appropriately so that identity is implemented for each of the requests

Article References to 15 Factors

Reference	Description
Initial Setup & Tools	Quick setup and tools reference to start with
01 - Codebase	Start with Git Repository
02 - Dependencies	Handle Dependencies
03 - Config	Managing project Configurations
04 - Backing services	Backing Services Insight
05 - Build, Release, Run	Build, Release, Run stages reference
06 Processes	Stateless Processes
07 - Port binding	Port Binding Approach reference
08 - Concurrency	Bringing-in Concurrency
09 - Disposability	Bringing-in Concurrency
10 - Dev / Prod Parity	Bringing-in Concurrency
11 - Logs	Logging Guidelines
12 - Admin Processes	Manage Admin Processes
13 - API First	API First Approach
14 - Telemetry	Telemetry - Application Monitoring
15 - Security	Security - Authentication and Authorization