12 Factor App Methodology

1. 12 Factor App Methodology
Laeshin Park
laeshiny@gmail.com

2. Table of Content
• About Me
• What is 12 Factor App
• Summary
• 12 Factor App Check List

3. About Me
• Interesting in Cloud Native
• This kind of methodology is new to me

4. What is 12 Factor App?
• Methodology for building software-as-a-service in the Cloud

5. Who wrote?
• http://12factor.net
• Manifesto written around 2012
• by Adam Wiggins (Heroku, co-founder)

6. For Who?
• Any developer building applications which run as a service.
• Ops engineers who deploy or manage such applications.

7. What is good?
• Minimize time and cost for new developers joining the project.
• Offer maximum portability between execution environments.
• Enable continuous deployment for maximum agility.
• Obviate the need for servers and systems administration.
• Can scale up without significant changes to tooling, architecture,
or development practices.

8. How?
• Use declarative formats for setup automation.
• Have a clean contract with the underlying operating system.
• Minimize divergence between development and production.

9. How?
• I. Codebase
• II Dependencies
• III. Config
• IV. Backing services
• V. Build, release, run
• VI. Processes
• VII. Port binding
• VIII. Concurrency
• IX. Disposability
• X. Dev/prod parity
• XI. Logs
• XII. Admin processes

10. I. Codebase
• One codebase tracked in revision control, many deploys
• VCS(Version Control System): subversion, git, ...

11. I. Codebase

12. I. Codebase
• Demo
• Git
• https://github.com/laeshiny/12factorapp

13. II. Dependencies
• Explicitly declare and isolate dependencies
• Never rely on implicit existence of system-wide packages
• Do not rely on the implicit existence of any system tools
• Example: curl

14. II. Dependencies
• Python
• Virtualenv
• Ruby
• Gemfile
• Demo
How to handle Dependencies

15. III. Config
• Resource handles to the database, Memcached, and other backing
services
• Credentials to external services such as Amazon S3 or Twitter
• Per-deploy values such as the canonical hostname for the deploy
• Everything that is likely to vary between deploys (staging,
production, developer environments, etc)
What is config?

16. III. Config
• “config” does not include internal application config
• Use config files which are not checked into revision control
• You can make your project open source
• Stores config in environment variables!!!!
How to handle config

17. III. Config
• Demo
• python code

18. IV. Backing services
• Any service the app consumes over the network as part of its
normal operation.
What is Backing services?

19. IV. Backing services
• locally-managed services,
• datastores : MySQL or CouchDB
• messaging/queueing systems : RabbitMQ or Beanstalkd
• SMTP services : Postfix
• caching systems : Memcached or Redis
• third parties managed
• SMTP services : Postmark
• metrics-gathering services : New Relic or Loggly
• binary asset services : Amazon S3
• API-accessible consumer services : Twitter, Google Maps, or Last.fm.
What is Backing services?

20. IV. Backing services
• Makes no distinction between local and third party services
• Treat backing services as attached resources
How to handle Backing service

21. IV. Backing services

22. API Server as interface for using Backend service
Apps
API
Server
https://10.10.10.10/resource/1
SELECT * FROM resource
SELECT * FROM resource2
{“data1”: 123}
{“data2”: “abc”}
{“data1”: 123,
“data2”: “abc”}
DNS
Lookup apiserver.com
10.10.10.10
Get https://apiserver.com/resource/1

23. V. Build, release, run
• Build : code repo + vendors dependencies + binaries and assets
• Release : Build output + config
• Run : Launching set of the app’s processes against a selected release

24. V. Build, release, run
• Use strict separation between the build, release, and run stage
How to handle Build, release, run

25. V. Build, release, run

26. VI. Processes
• Execute the app as one or more stateless processes
• Processes are stateless and share-nothing

27. VI. Processes
• Never assumes that anything cached in memory or on disk will be available
on a future request or job
• Any data that needs to persist must be stored in a stateful backing service,
typically a database
• Web systems should never be used or relied upon ““sticky sessions”
• Session state data is a good candidate for a datastore that offers time-
expiration, such as Memcached or Redis
How to handle Processes

28. VII. Port binding
• Export services via port binding
• One app can become the backing service for another app

29. VII. Port binding
• Ex)
• http://main-portal.com/users/laeshiny >> http://main-
portal.com:5001/users/laeshiny
• http://main-portal.com/config/app1 >> http://main-
portal.com:5002/config/app1
How to handle Port binding

30. VIII. Concurrency
• Scale out via the process model
• The application must also be able to span multiple processes running on
multiple physical machines

31. VIII. Concurrency

32. VIII. Concurrency
• Should never daemonize or write PID files.
• Rely on the operating system’s process manager
• manage output streams
• respond to crashed processes
• handle user-initiated restarts and shutdowns
• ex) Upstart, Foreman, Systemd
• Demo
How to handle Concurrency

33. IX. Disposability
• Be disposable, meaning they can be started or stopped at a moment’s notice
• Maximize robustness with fast startup and graceful shutdown
• This facilitates fast elastic scaling, rapid deployment of code or config
changes, and robustness of production deploys

34. IX. Disposability
• Processes should strive to minimize startup time
• Processes shut down gracefully when they receive a SIGTERM signal from
the process manager
• A web process ceases to listen on the service port (thereby refusing any new requests),
allowing any current requests to finish, and then exiting
• A worker process returns the current job to the work queue
• Processes should also be robust against sudden death, in the case of a
failure in the underlying hardware
How to handle Disposability

35. X. Dev/prod parity
• Keep development, staging, and production as similar as possible
• developer resists the urge to use different backing services between
development and production
Traditional app Twelve-factor app
Time between deploys Weeks Hours
Code authors vs code deployers Different people Same people
Dev vs production environments Divergent As similar as possible

36. XI. Logs
• Logs are the stream of aggregated, time-ordered events collected from the
output streams of all running processes and backing services
• Logs provide visibility into the behavior of a running app
• Treat logs as event streams

37. XI. Logs
• Never concerns itself with routing or storage of its output stream
• In staging or production deploys, each process’ stream will be captured by
the execution environment, collated together with all other streams from
the app, and routed to one or more final destinations for viewing and long-
term archival
• Demo
• Fluentd
How to handle Logs

38. XII. Admin processes
• Run admin/management tasks as one-off processes
• One-off admin processes should be run in an identical environment as the
regular long-running processes of the app
• The same dependency isolation techniques should be used on all process
types
• Strongly favors languages which provide a REPL shell out of the box, and
which make it easy to run one-off scripts

39. Summary
• Scalable
• Easy Management
• I. Codebase
• II Dependencies
• III. Config
• IV. Backing services
• V. Build, release, run
• VI. Processes
• VII. Port binding
• VIII. Concurrency
• IX. Disposability
• X. Dev/prod parity
• XI. Logs
• XII. Admin processes

40. 12 Factors App Check List
Use VCS(subversion, git, ....)
Execution environment is isolated
It is easy to access Backend Service
Build, Stage, Run environment is sperated
Use Process Manager to manage the application
Support short startup time and graceful shutdown
Dev environment is identical to prod environment
Collect logs in the datastore by the another app.

41. Want to talk more

42. Thank you for your attention