This document discusses the differences between a web portal and a web application. It then outlines some key characteristics of modern cloud-born web applications, including being ubiquitous, flexible in deployment options, portable, and able to take advantage of massive ecosystems. The document discusses design considerations like availability, performance, reliability, scalability, manageability and cost. It proposes a cloud-born system architecture and discusses advantages and disadvantages. Key recommendations for developing cloud-born applications include statelessness, caching, avoiding topology-specific coding, automating deployments, and focusing on simplicity and zero downtime deployments.