Microsoft has unveiled a set of best practices it calls the reliable web app (RWA) pattern for .NET, a set of best practices designed to help developers move applications to the company’s Azure cloud.

Introduced March 7, RWA was built on the Azure Well-Architected Framework. RWA offers prescriptive guidance on technical and business objectives, covering areas such as security, operations, and cost optimization. A reference implementation provides a production-grade web application for .NET. Objectives of the RWA include:

• Low-cost, high-value wins
• Minimal code changes
• Security best practices
• Reliability design patterns
• Improved operational excellence
• Cost-optimized environments
• Well-architected framework principles
• Service-level objective of 99.9%

A series of instructional videos has been posted on YouTube that covers reliability, security, performance optimization, and other aspects of RWA. Elaborating on cloud deployment, Microsoft noted low-cost code changes developers can make to prepare an application for deployment to the cloud.

For example, the Retry pattern allows an app to handle temporary service interruptions, while the Circuit Breaker prevents an application from repeatedly invoking a service that is down. The Cache-Aside pattern can improve performance and help maintain consistency between an in-memory cache and the persistent data store.