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.
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.
