Hey everyone!

We’re back with our fantastic series on the 12 factors for modern application development. Today, we’re diving into the ninth factor: Disposability. If you’re just joining us, no worries, you can still check out the other factors on our blog!

What is Disposability?

Disposability is an application’s ability to quickly start, safely terminate, and easily recover from system failures. The ninth factor emphasizes the importance of building resilient and adaptable applications, capable of handling unexpected changes and minimizing downtime.

Why is Disposability Important?

Focusing on disposability brings several benefits:

  1. Agility: Disposable applications start quickly, which means you can scale, deploy, and make adjustments more rapidly and efficiently.

  2. Resilience: Disposable applications are designed to handle failures and recover quickly, reducing the impact of such issues and keeping the system running more reliably.

  3. Easier maintenance: With disposability, you can update or replace parts of your application without significant disruptions to the service.

How to Implement Disposability?

Here are some tips and best practices to achieve disposability in your applications:

  1. Use ephemeral processes: Quickly process tasks and release resources as soon as possible. Applications that consume fewer resources and are fast in their execution are easier to manage and scale.

  2. Design for failures: Assume that failures will occur and design your application to handle them. Implement recovery mechanisms and redundancy to ensure service continuity.

  3. Monitor and log: Monitor your application and log important information. This will allow you to identify and fix issues quickly, improving the application’s overall resilience.

  4. Use containerization technologies: Tools like Docker and Kubernetes make it easier to create and manage disposable applications, allowing you to deploy and manage instances quickly and efficiently.

Stay Tuned

Now that you know more about the ninth factor, Disposability, we hope you can apply these concepts to your own applications! Keep following our series on the 12 factors to learn even more. In the next post, we’ll cover the tenth factor. You won’t want to miss it!

If you’re enjoying this series, share it with your friends and colleagues! And, of course, we’d love to hear your thoughts and experiences. Leave a comment below to let us know what you think, or if you have any questions or suggestions.

Until next time!