Introducing the modern web app pattern for .NET

We are excited to introduce the Modern Web App (MWA) pattern for .NET. MWA is part of our Enterprise App Patterns (EAP), that offers guidance to accelerate app modernization to the cloud. MWA provides developer patterns, prescriptive architecture, reference implementation, and infrastructure guidance that aligns with the principles of the Azure Well-Architected Framework (WAF) and 12-factor app methodologies so you can be assured the guidance is real-world proven.

The Modern Web App (MWA) pattern marks the next stage in transforming monolithic web applications toward cloud-native architecture, with a focus on the Refactor modernization strategy. Building on the Reliable Web App (RWA) pattern, which helped organizations transition to cloud with minimal changes under a Replatform approach, MWA guides teams further by encouraging decoupling and decomposition of key functions into microservices. This enables high-demand areas to be optimized for agility and scalability, providing dedicated resources for critical components and enhancing reliability and performance. Decoupling also allows independent versioning and scaling, delivering cost efficiency and flexibility to evolve individual app components without affecting the entire system.

Key Features of Modern Web App pattern

The Modern Web App Pattern provides detailed guidance to decouple critical parts of a web application, enabling independent scaling, greater agility, and cost optimization. This decoupling approach ensures that high-demand components have dedicated resources and may be versioned and scaled independently, improving the reliability and performance of the application and agility to enhance features separately. By separating services, the risk of degradation in one part of the app affecting other parts is minimized. Here are some strategies MWA adopts: 

• Modernization through Refactoring 
  Built on top of the Reliable Web App Pattern, MWA focuses on optimizing high-demand areas of web applications by decoupling critical components. 
• Incremental modernization using strangler-fig pattern 
  Guidance for incremental refactoring from monolithic to decoupled services, reducing risks during modernization and improving agility for new features. 
• Embracing Cloud-Native architectures 
  Leverages Azure services such as Azure App Services, Azure Container Apps, Azure Container Registry, Azure Service Bus, Azure Monitor and more to build independently scalable, resilient cloud-native applications. 
• Independent scaling using Azure Container Apps 
  Allows key parts of the app to scale independently, optimizing resource usage and reducing costs. 
• Enhanced security and availability 
  Hub and Spoke architecture for production infrastructure improves security and isolates workloads, and multi-region deployment supports a 99.9% business srvice-level objectives (SLO). 

What’s covered in the reference implementation?

In this context, we use a fictional company, Relecloud’s, evolving business needs to illustrate the Modern Web App (MWA) pattern, which takes scalability further through decoupling and refactoring of monolithic line-of-business web app. This architecture enables independent scaling via microservices for high demand, supporting Relecloud's growth while enhancing security, agility and reliability meeting the 99.9% business SLO uptime requirement.

Get started

• We created a full production-grade application that you can deploy easily to Azure to see all of the principles of MWA in action. Visit the MWA GitHub repo for more information.
• Check out all of the in-depth documentation on Microsoft Learn.
• Try out the patterns included in MWA and share your feedback in comments.