Twelve-Factor App
A methodology for building cloud-native applications with 12 principles: codebase, dependencies, config, backing services, build/release/run, processes, port binding, concurrency, disposability, dev/prod parity, logs, admin processes.
What is Twelve-Factor App?
A methodology for building cloud-native applications with 12 principles: codebase, dependencies, config, backing services, build/release/run, processes, port binding, concurrency, disposability, dev/prod parity, logs, admin processes.
Twelve-Factor App is a intermediate-level concept that sits in the Cloud Infrastructure area of system design. Engineers reach for it whenever they need to reason about real-world trade-offs in that space — not just for textbook correctness, but because real production systems at companies like Netflix, Amazon, and Google make these decisions every day.
If you want to go deeper than this definition — with diagrams, code, and a quiz to lock it in — work through the "Twelve-Factor App" lesson linked below. It walks through the why, the mechanism, the trade-offs, and how the giants actually use it in production.
Learn Twelve-Factor App in depth
Full interactive lesson with diagrams, code examples, real-world references, and a quiz.
Open the Twelve-Factor App lessonSee also
Related glossary terms you might want to look up next.
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Microservices
An architecture where an application is split into small, independent services that communicate over the network. Each service owns its own data and can be deployed separately.
Serverless
A cloud execution model where the provider manages all infrastructure and you pay only for actual compute time. AWS Lambda, Vercel Functions, and Cloudflare Workers are serverless.