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- Hacker News
- How is this only from 2025? I thought this was a thing back in 2015by subarctic
- It's even older the page says "Last updated 2017" and the repo goes back to 2011, and in fact see HN discussion from November 2011: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3267187by svat
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37862016
> Related:
> Ask HN: Is 12factor.net Still Relevant? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36283702 - June 2023 (6 comments)
> 12 Factor App Revisited - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33164407 - Oct 2022 (7 comments)
> Twelve-factor app anno 2022 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31225921 - May 2022 (35 comments)
> The Twelve-Factor App (2011) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31198956 - April 2022 (102 comments)
> Twelve-factor app development on Google Cloud - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21415488 - Nov 2019 (63 comments)
> The Twelve-Factor App - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19947507 - May 2019 (3 comments)
> 12 Factor CLI Apps - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18172689 - Oct 2018 (247 comments)
> 12 factor app configuration vs. leaking environment variables (2014) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15869436 - Dec 2017 (2 comments)
> Ask HN: Alternative to Heroku that doesn't enforce 12-factor - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10628961 - Nov 2015 (1 comment)
> The Twelve-Factor App - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10288216 - Sept 2015 (3 comments)
> The Twelve-Factor App - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9492120 - May 2015 (2 comments)
> Twelve-Factor Applications with Consul - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7780249 - May 2014 (2 comments)
> The Twelve-Factor App - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7547687 - April 2014 (1 comment)
> Building Twelve Factor Apps on Heroku - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6219444 - Aug 2013 (1 comment)
> 12 Factor model for architecting SaaS applications - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6060381 - July 2013 (1 comment)
> The Twelve-Factor App - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5979452 - July 2013 (1 comment)
> 12factor: Methodology for Building Software-as-a-Service Apps - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4027026 - May 2012 (1 comment)
> Twelve Factors of Web Application Development - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3267187 - Nov 2011 (37 comments)
by michchinn - You have to enjoy this article from the perception of its time.
For example #1, the idea of a central codebase + many deploys was not always the way folks did things lol.
The (2025) date must not be correct…
by jchook - It's not this came out in 2012 when Heroku was The Way to run SaaS appsby nunez
- Very good discussion on III. Config or the use of environment variables for config.
For the sake of discussion I'd share an argument against X. Dev/Prod parity
https://www.sc.com/engineering/blogs/Technology/development-...
I do not fully agree with the author and I think the author is reaching a bit hard because in my reading Twelve-Factor App X does not argue for complete parity. My reading is that whatever the app is interfacing should be kept as similar as possible.
by chanux - that link 404's :(
- Good best practices, mostly, but I feel the 12FA model totally punted on state by defining it out of scope: "state is over there in that external service, three-monkeys-emoji".
Yeah but sometimes state is the entire point and you need to manage it yourself, and then some of your processes must be 9 or 10 factor as a result.
by imglorp - State is always the entire point.by xorcist
- I can't believe how old this is and I feel like most devs still haven't internalized this which is a shame.
- Now they'll never need to now that they have agentsby nunez
- Pass the word!
I hired about 50 software interns and junior in the past 5 years. None had ever heard of it before I told them.
by mocamoca - Is it devs that haven't internalized this? Or management? Because I'd love to do this, but I always report to people who demand that everything be done in "a few days".
- .env as we know is full of problems... BUT! check out varlock (https://varlock.dev) - it's free and open source, and we have really modernized and adapted the familiar syntax (a small DSL on top) to make it much better.
Has built-in validation, type-safety, composition via functions, loading with plugins, leak prevention, and much more.
by theozero - I think the idea to use the environment is misguided in general.
The environment was only ever good for things like GOMAXPROCS where you want a single point of truth for all processes on a machine but in a containerized world even that point is moot. Where regular config in the environment just problematic it is outright dangerous for secrets.
by weinzierl - Title should read (2011)by RKearney
- Its interesting how this felt so natural and right way to do software. I remember people referencing it as the north star. And then gradually people came close to it but moved past it. Personally I feel that these concepts require to have generalist mindset aka application architect. What we have as of today are lot of product engineers within teams, product managers and management. The product engineers do not always have enough leverage or incentives to push for these kind of concepts.
And still at the same time these concepts feel like so much carved in stone that one way or another everyone is going to keep discovering them again.
by sandeepkd - I don't know. I've seen lots of "architects" conceptualizing just overly complex structures.by _def
- Idk I still think it's a great way to ship softwareby nunez
- Heroku seemed like it was going to be the future back then. Every time I find myself struggling to understand some nonsense in Azure I dream of the simpler future we lost.by dec0dedab0de
- I've got to give credit where it is due... It really feels like Laravel Cloud picked up where Heroku left off. Or at least is trying to.by jpb0104
- Give Cloud Run a try if you haven't. It's basically serverless done right.by vrosas
- Sucks that it didn't become that. "heroku up" or "cf push" (Heroku kind of sort of invented build packs) was hella addictive.
Shoot, I'm sad that Docker didn't become the way to run containers. compose/swarm is still light years easier than Kubernetes
I guess Heroku ran so that Vercel could fly?
by nunez - Fly.io brings back some of that easy of deploy.by cgarvis
- They got painfully expensive and then acquired. I still remember the arguments with clients and finally went all in AWS ECS, which is still quite pricey but clients seem to complain less about the Amazon bill then they did about Heroku.by rietta
- I really thought this would be a 12 layer MFA demo showing the absurdity of our current painful & unsustainable MFA trends.
- > painful & unsustainable MFA trends.
This very web-forum was a very big proponent of those politics a few years ago.
by paganel - Okay so this may sound odd but this is literally my whole life right now...
Can you explain why do you feel MFA is painful/unsustainable? How would you fix it?
by xander_north - Every time I leave my phone in the other room to “finally get some work done”, please enter this goddamn number we sent to your SMS, and I close my laptop.
- Still incredibly relevant. Even if you don’t apply it, there is so much to learn by reading this in 15 minutes.
The only grievance I have with this is Chapter 3: Config [1] “Store config in the environment”, “Credentials to external services such as Amazon S3 or Twitter”
Besides being bad advice, this had the second-order effect of leading devs to believe they could put all their local env secrets in ~/.bashrc files.
Stop doing this. Do the other 11.5 factors.
by nebezb