I love 12 factor

If you haven’t heard or read about 12 factor, read about it here.

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

Listing the 12 factors here:

• One codebase tracked in revision control, many deploys
• Explicitly declare and isolate dependencies
• Store config in the environment
• Treat backing services as attached resources
• Strictly separate build and run stages
• Execute the app as one or more stateless processes
• Export services via port binding
• Scale out via the process model
• Maximize robustness with fast startup and graceful shutdown
• Keep development, staging, and production as similar as possible
• Treat logs as event streams
• Run admin/management tasks as one-off processes