I was working in the midwest for an enterprise during the early 2010’s that was struggling to modernize its enormous data catalog. Scaling, searching, and data portability were all in the early stages as these datasets were starting their first migrations out of mainframes and into web services. What became apparent was how ill prepared these webservice tools were with handling these massive datasets. But how on earth were our competitors able to do this? They did not seem to struggle with the scaling, searching, and data portability concerns that most of our engineering team struggled with.
During my search, I discovered there was quite a radical shift going on in enterprise software engineering. ‘Microservices’ and ‘Cloud’ were beginning to take hold as the new way to build web applications for high volume web services. I was introduced to The 12 Factor App along with ‘Spring Boot’, and the rest is history.
As a developer, suddenly I had a roadmap and a toolset to build almost anything on the web. It was also fast and scalable, and I was no longer asking how and what can we build, but where and when can we build it?
This marks the start of a series of musings exploring each of the twelve factors and how they have related to my journey through enterprise software development. Next time I will discuss the importance of codebase tracing and how difficult development can be if we fall short of this factor.