This principle describes that administrative or management tasks should be executed as separate short-lived processes. The technology ideally supports command execution in a shell that operates on the running environment.

Although containers encapsulate Unix processes, they provide additional functionality to execute single commands or to open a remote shell into the container. Engineers can therefore execute the management and administration scripts provided by the Java EE application server. Still, in Java EE applications, the number of required administration and management tasks are limited. A Container runs the application server process, which auto-deploys the application; no further application life cycle management is required.

Administrative tasks are usually required for debugging and troubleshooting purposes. Therefore containers and container orchestration frameworks offer possibilities to open remote shells into the containers or execute one-time commands. Apart from that, the Chapter 9, Monitoring, Performance, and Logging will show you what is necessary to gather further monitoring information about enterprise applications.

The motivations of the 12-factors are to develop stateless, scalable enterprise applications that embrace Continuous Delivery and modern environment platforms, optimize time and effort spent in development and try to avoid software erosion. 12-factor application have a clean contract with their underlying system and ideally declarative infrastructure definitions.