People use IIS?
Why, should I not be using IIS?
What should I be doing?
In the company Slack, I said something like "Serious question; is there something that IIS does better than something like Nginx or any other open source server?"
One of the most senior engineers responded back with "crashing".
It’s an “old-world” web-server (like Apache, etc) which defaults to “filesystem-first” which is great for quickly making a directory available on the web, and its architecture employing recyclable worker-processes (since IIS 6) with limited privileges gives it the performance benefits of in-proc code-execution (vs CGI/FastCGI) without the risk of a vuln compromising the entire web server. Oh, and HTTP.sys is pretty nice and fast too. I’ve never had reliability or crashing issues with IIS: if your worker-process goes down it means your application code has a crashing bug in it, not IIS.
Yeah, nginx is nice - but is also a relatively recent tool (since 2004, I didn’t start seeing people prefer it for projects until after NodeJS gave them a reason to use it - so around 10 years ago). While nginx supports Windows, there’s a big fat caution saying it’s performance is sub-par still: https://nginx.org/en/docs/windows.html
So if you’re on Windows - because you’re a (non-Linux) .NET shop, or want/need to run on on-prem Windows Server boxes (especially SMB scenarios) it just makes sense to use IIS: it’s already there and certainly is not an underperforming, insecure, or otherwise “bad” web-server.
A lot of enterprise software is built in .NET for Windows, and as the expectation of web-based UIs for said software has increased... honestly I'd be surprised if IIS usage wasn't increasing in overall uses (though not in market share, for certain).
I ended up wedging a Samba daemon between that and PCs running Windows 10. I mount the DOS box's share via mount.smbfs and re-export it via Samba. The machine is on a rather sparse VLAN!
I have many other horrors on isolated VLANs across the UK to worry about ...
Of course not and I didn't say any such thing. The original comment "People use IIS?" is clearly a passive-aggressive dig at MS, its tech, and those that use it (as is so often the case in tech circles). It's quite pathetic and childish. If I misunderstood that, then I apologise to the author, but I'd argue it still adds nothing to the discourse even if it was asked honestly.
It doesn't mean you can't hold an opinion on the relative merits of any one piece of tech. But this "my computer is better than your computer" immature schoolboy nonsense is pervasive in tech circles and is extremely tedious.
I have no love for IIS, but it's a perfectly capable webserver and is clearly still used. The idea that the .NET world have all moved over to .NET Core is also a wishful one unfortunately, I still maintain my open-source libraries for the legacy framework as I know there's plenty of places that can't just 'flip the switch' to .NET Core. It's not quite as bad as Python's V3 moment, but it's up there.
Feels a bit snarky, but not too aggressive. Windows is not a popular choice for cloud platforms and those users seem to be overrepresented here. I can imagine someone being genuinely surprised it's used for more than serving documentation that's already on a Windows server.
That said, as I mentioned earlier, it's hard to find a use case where IIS (or Windows) is a better choice than any of the popular open source http servers and app platform runtimes.
There is a colossal corpus of .NET Framework code out there and I wouldn't be surprised it achieves the status of COBOL (but with a lot less charm) at some point in the future - where code on it is maintained ad infinitum even though almost nobody would deploy a greenfield app using it.
In common with all web servers, advice found via search varies in quality and unfortunately, being Windows based: IIS really suffers. The GUI is pretty intimidating (IIS Manager - both of them) and there are things that can only be done via registry, config files and dark magic.
IIS gets a lot of undeserved stick in my opinion.
I am almost perversely going to get into IIS but I probably won't. Following logs on Windows is a right old ballache. The bloody things don't seem to get written to disc for quite a while for those many systems that ignore the Windows Events system and dump to .log. I've tried various log viewers. Where the hell is lnav or even less for Windows?
My snags with Windows is opacity. I fire up a daemon on a Linux box and then in another tab/window or whatever, I follow logs - I can use less (is more) or something fancier like lnav. That workflow does not translate very well to Windows.
The taskmanager on Windows is much improved these days - you can now with a GUI work from a network port to a binary (PID) and even associate it with a particular service.
However, text logs are still second class citizens.
I'm perfectly willing to confide IIS is a fair bit faster, more reliable, and better to work with these days than it was in those - but that's a hell of a long way from imagining it's anything like good.
(Also, a pedant's unrelated note, because I've seen a lot of this in particular lately and I'm going to say something about it somewhere: "hove" is an archaic past tense of "heave", as in the related nautical phrase "heave to," as might be found in a commerce raider's injunction to "heave to and prepare to receive boarders". So something properly is said to heave over the horizon; only after it has done so may it rightly be said to have hove.)
If you already paid for your Windows license, not that much. The way it ties into the OS is a bit concerning to me but, apart from that, it's OK.
I think the question can be formulated in a different way: what's RIGHT with using IIS? What does IIS offer you that other web servers don't? Easy AD integration is the one thing that crosses my mind, and I can't think of anything else besides "it's already there".
If you plan on scaling out, however, licensing costs will grow quickly. If you run .NET Core apps, the built-in HTTP server is very fast and runs on Linux as well. Same story with Spring apps - using Netty/Jetty or even Tomcat is easy and makes your app very self-contained.
I think the big nope for me is that it is from the "Pets" era, before servers were "cattle", which was compounded by containerization and tools like Kubernetes and OpenShift. IIS just doesn't look like it fits into that new model.
There is still no equivalent to Microsoft Exchange, Group Policy, Enterprise PKI, and a bunch of other things in the Linux world. SAMBA copies Active Directory, but it's a direct clone, not a unique product.
Not to mention that SQL Server isn't somehow "copying" UNIX. Its performance and feature set blows most of the open-source databases out of the water, with only Postgres having superior features (but not performance).
Microsoft essentially invented OLAP with SQL Analysis Services, and they still have the most popular products in that space, such as Power BI.
Etc...
The tooling around SQL Server is decent
Which also means fewer attack vectors.
UNIX was not an option for most people which is one of the reasons why NT killed the Unix workstation market and Microsoft software like IIS, MS SQL and Exchange was already established when Linux gained mainstream adoption.
Since then, they migrated to .Net "Core"[0] which can run on any OS/web-server. Per [0] they initially kept IIS, but once you're on .Net Core+ that certainly isn't a requirement and there may be good licensing or performance reasons to migrate (even with headless Windows Server/IIS).
I did find an article from last year that said they still had a monolithic architecture and were still on-prem (as opposed to cloud/Azure). So, maybe, still on IIS? They certainly did for YEARS.
[0] https://www.infoq.com/news/2020/04/Stack-Overflow-New-Archit...
I still don't get it.