Microsoft IIS is an application server and infrastructure.
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Microsoft Application Server (deprecated)
Score 8.2 out of 10
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Application Server is an expanded server role in the Windows Server® 2008 operating system. It provided an integrated environment for deploying and running custom, server-based business applications. These applications respond to requests that arrive over the network from remote client computers or from other applications. Application Server is deprecated.
Publishing applications or websites is easy with Microsoft IIS. You don't need external software or complicated tutorials involving command lines and editing configuration files. On other hand, sometimes the troubleshooter needs a high knowledge of Windows Server, Registry, and tools to debug the application. If you need to host non-Microsoft technology as PHP pages or have a low budget, I recommend IIS equivalent software as Apache.
Microsoft Application Server has been incredible this past year during COVID. Previously I would have said that we could go without it, but after this past season, I’m glad we have utilized it. Without having this software set up prior to COVID, we would have been in a tough situation. I mention COVID a lot because we were able to continue our work almost seamlessly this entire year.
A big advantage that we use all the time is reviewing the logs that automatically get generated in IIS. It has helped us troubleshoot various problems in our applications over the years.
IIS integrates really well with Visual Studio and TFS. We are able to quickly deploy new applications and changes to applications when requested by the business.
IIS has proven that it is easy to configure and maintain with minimal effort.
We have no intention to replace all applications running on top of the IIS platform. Not all applications support other platforms and not all support staff are skilled in Linux/Apache platform support. Whereas IIS may not be the best performing or most secure web platform available, for the aforementioned reasons, it is impossible not to continue use of this product.
As I've mentioned earlier, Microsoft IIS is very simple and easy to use. The user interface is a little bit overloaded with a huge number of different options, but once you have a little clue of what you are doing and what you need - no issues at all.
I have found Microsoft Application Server to be incredibly easy to use. I have used dozens of similar programs and have always struggled to navigate through all the functions. So far I have been able to adapt and learn this software with ease. I rarely run into a problem that I wasn’t easily able to move forward on with a few tips.
ARR (application request routing) in Microsoft IIS Server enables the web-admins to increase the web app reliability and availability through the rule based routing and load balancing of HTTP requests which in turn provides highly available server. IIS 7.0 Manager also provides kernel as well as user mode caching for faster performance and in case if the server fails, the IIS server has good amount of details logged in its log files which help understand and debug the cause quickly. Load balancing facilitates IIS server to fight against availability issues.
In my experience, I have never had significant issues with IIS performance. Sometimes I've experienced issues with loading time, but it is mostly related to the web site code. However Amazon, Microsoft and Google providing free cloud services with very limited resources, and in that scenario, "heavy" websites on IIS could be the issue. In other situations - performance is good.
As mentioned earlier there is so much documentation or guides or stack overflow questions out there that someone will have faced the same or very similar scenario to what you are going through that you will almost certainly find a solution to what you are after.
Stability is one of the first things we consider when evaluating software. MS Application Server has been rock solid and has reduced the time that our IT staff dedicates to maintaining our legacy applications.
Apache is java. Java is unnecessary complex. No developer wants to invest in learning all the hundreds of text based configuration files to get something done. Also, apache gives you the most evil and un-usable user interface possible. [Microsoft] IIS makes [life] after development easy, which is already complex enough to be bothered by something as mundane as exposing your work over the internet.
It has a similar feature to what Microsoft Application Server has but at a greater cost and also having to deal with another vendor when we could use a full Microsoft Stack for better training and support.
Microsoft IIS Server is scalable if the underlying server configuration is done correctly. Use x64 edition v/s 32bit and using 32bit mode application pools are some of the tweaks to be done to make the IIS server scalable. There are too many small configurations need to be carried out in order to make a highly scalable IIS server hence not giving full score in this area.
Our ROI has been great since it has enabled our IT staff to have a central location to perform application updates which enables us to save time and money.
Deployment is very easy since the internal applications that required constant updating are now updated in one central location.
It's a lot easier to be within compliance protocols requirements.
