I was talking to a friend of mine this week and he pointed me to something I'd never heard of before. The Twelve-Factor App from Heroku. I will share the core of the philosophy and the 12 factors, but I encourage you to read them in detail at http://12factor.net/. Lots of great takeaways here.

From The Introduction:

In the modern era, software is commonly delivered as a service: called web apps, or software-as-a-service. The twelve-factor app is a methodology for building software-as-a-service apps that:

• Use declarative formats for setup automation, to minimize time and cost for new developers joining the project;

• Have a clean contract with the underlying operating system, 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;

• And can scale up without significant changes to tooling, architecture, or development practices.

The twelve-factor methodology can be applied to apps written in any programming language, and which use any combination of backing services (database, queue, memory cache, etc).

The Twelve Factors

I. Codebase

One codebase tracked in revision control, many deploys

II. Dependencies

Explicitly declare and isolate dependencies

III. Config

Store config in the environment

IV. Backing Services

Treat backing services as attached resources

V. Build, release, run

Strictly separate build and run stages

VI. Processes

Execute the app as one or more stateless processes

VII. Port binding

Export services via port binding

VIII. Concurrency

Scale out via the process model

IX. Disposability

Maximize robustness with fast startup and graceful shutdown

X. Dev/prod parity

Keep development, staging, and production as similar as possible

XI. Logs

Treat logs as event streams

XII. Admin processes

Run admin/management tasks as one-off processes