Developing, deploying, and operating twelve-factor applications with TOSCA

With Cloud Computing, offering and delivering services over the Internet became commonly feasible. This has impacts on application design, development as well as on the automation of application provisioning. The Twelve-Factor App is a methodology that documents best practices for building and operating scalable, maintainable, and portable web-based SaaS applications. However, a standards-based approach to build, release, and run Twelve-Factor Apps independently of individual cloud providers and specific deployment technologies is missing, which quickly leads to a vendor or technology lock-in. In this paper, we introduce a guideline to establish a development process using the Twelve-Factor App methodology together with the OASIS standard TOSCA to address this issue. We show how to realize the twelve factors with TOSCA and how the approach supports portability and automated deployment.