Sometimes I post about things where I have done some work and provided some deep thought, and I want to share my knowledge. Sometimes I just “pass things along”, when I find something that is technically solid and useful. This post is more of a “pass it on” post.
Many of my customers are beginning to seriously think about doing “Cloud Native” development in 2019, based on the questions that I get asked. When I say “Cloud Native” development, I am referring to the development of projects that are built on the Cloud, and produce applications and (micro)services that live on the Cloud. This isn’t about moving server workloads to the cloud, it’s about new development efforts.
These customers are asking me about tooling, approaches and techniques for doing software development on the Cloud. I would often point them to some of my blog posts on how to organize your IBM Cloud environment, or to something good on microservices. One other good site, which I thought was more popular, is the 12 Factor App guidelines.
The 12 Factor App site has a nice simple write up which reminds you a bit of the Agile Manifesto. It has 12 factors which you can see, and each has a short and quick description of what is important about that factor. it’s definitely worth a look – it takes a grand total of about 15 minutes to read through the whole thing. Some of the factors are more development focused (like Config and Codebase), some are operations focused (Dev/Prod parity and Build/Release/Run), and others are more architectural (Dependencies and Concurrency) in nature. The important thing to remember is that ALL project participants should be aware of, and know the importance of, each one of the factors.
So if you are one of those organizations that are looking at making a serious impact with Cloud Native development this year, I strongly urge you to take the time to read the 12 Factor App guidelines and let me know what you think. Then feel free to ask me how to accomplish any of these things in the IBM Cloud.
Dan Toczala's Blog 