Before 2005, most of the technology was open source and enterprises were consuming open source to accomplish their business goals and the trend seems to continue to grow. Take the operating system as an example. The use and popularity of Linux have been growing day by day. Another good example is the database industry where MySQL and Postgres are rapidly growing over time as opposed to Oracle or Microsoft’s SQL Server.

The open-source trend was not surprising as proprietary technology leads to lock-ins and as these enterprises grow, their reliance on these foundational pieces continues to grow over time. This makes it really difficult and costly for these enterprises to switch to new technology, locking them into the closed-source technology and leaving them vulnerable to hefty prices or punitive charges as they scale. This drove many enterprises to come together and join hands to collectively build different open-source components.

Twelve Factor App Methodology

The Twelve-Factor App methodology is a set of best practices for building and deploying cloud-native applications. It was developed by Heroku, a cloud platform as a service (PaaS) provider, and has since been widely adopted by organizations as a guide for building cloud-native applications.

The Twelve-Factor App methodology consists of 12 principles that are designed to help developers build applications that are easy to scale, maintain, and deploy in a cloud environment.

The term Cloud isn’t a physical entity but is meant to represent the infrastructure of the internet. It’s called Cloud to signify that the users of the Cloud don’t have to worry about the underlying complexities of the infrastructure but can use it as building blocks for their application. Behind the scenes, the cloud is a vast network of physical machines across the globe connected together and abstracted for its end users for dedicated tasks from running applications to storing data to managed applications.