Yes! In cloud environments you are more likely to lose connections that would be reliably persistent on a LAN.
MS Entity Framework supports various IDbExecutionStrategy and one provided in v6 named SqlAzureExecutionStrategy is made specifically to retry connections before failing outright. From here:
With the rise of cloud based database servers such as Windows Azure SQL Database and connections over less reliable networks it is now more common for connection breaks to occur. This could be due to defensive techniques that cloud databases use to ensure fairness of service, such as connection throttling, or to instability in the network causing intermittent timeouts and other transient errors.
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