Kakao Entertainment FE Applies 12-Factor Principles to Next.js, Reducing Deployment Time from 15 Minutes to 1 Minute

Based on their experience operating Next.js-based services such as KakaoPage Web, the Kakao Entertainment FE development team shared a case study of applying 12-Factor App principles to the frontend domain. By strictly separating the 'build, release, and run' stages using Docker, they significantly reduced deployment time from approximately 15 minutes to approximately 1 minute, thereby lowering dependencies between development and operations and establishing a Cloud Native environment, including the setup of preview servers. Additionally, to address the difficulty of maintaining context between requests due to Node.js's single-threaded nature, they introduced the experimental feature async_hooks (using the wrapping library express-http-context) to enable tracing of server-side and client-side logs for a single request under one contextId. Furthermore, they presented specific methodologies for applying key 12-Factor principles in practice, such as injecting runtime environment variables (using runtimeConfig) and horizontally scaling processes via pm2.