Beyond the Twelve-Factor App

The Greek poet and mercenary Archilochus actually first discussed
this concept by saying, “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog
knows one big thing.” The core of this quote forces us to look at
where we spend our time and resources and compare that to the one
big thing that we want to do. What does your company or team want
to accomplish? Chances are, you didn’t answer this question with
things like failover, resiliency, elastic scalability, or automated
deployment. No, what you want to build is the thing that distinguishes
you from all the others. You want to build the thing that is
the key to your business, and leave all the other stuff to someone (or
something) else.
This is the age of the cloud, and we need to build our applications in
a way that embraces this. We need to build our applications so that
we can spend the majority of our time working on the hedgehog
(the one big thing) and let someone or something else take care of
the fox’s many small things. Super fast time to market is no longer a
nice-to-have; it’s a necessity to avoid being left behind by our competition.
We want to be able to devote our resources to our business
domain, and let other experts deal with the things they do better
than us.
By embracing cloud-native architecture, and building our applications
on the assumption that everything is a service and that they will
be deployed in a cloud environment, we can get all of these benefits
and much more. The question isn’t why cloud-native? The question
you have to ask yourself is why are you not embracing cloud native?
The Purist vs the Pragmatist
With all patterns from SOA to REST and everything in between,
there are the shining ideals held atop ivory towers, and then there is
the reality of real-world development teams, budgets, and constraints.
The trick is in determining which ideals on which you will
not budge, and which ideals you will allow to get a little muddy in
service of the pragmatic needs to get products shipped on time.
Throughout this book, I have mentioned where compromises
against the ideal are possible or even common, and was also clear
where experience shows we simply cannot acquiesce. The decision is
ultimately yours, and we would all be extremely happy if every
application we created was a pure cloud-native application that
never violated a single guideline from this book, but reality and
54 | Chapter 16: A Word on Cloud Native