Item: Microsoft IIS
Rating: 6
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Microsoft IIS across the enterprise as an offering for web servers on Windows machines. We use it to host several of our enterprise workloads as well as some of our smaller web properties. IIS has been a staple of our stack for many years.

Pros and Cons

Handle a decent amount of loads
Easily configurable
Simple UI to customize for different applications

Is memory-intensive
Has multi-threading issues
Cannot be used for connection pooling by itself

Return on Investment

Security has always been a concern with IIS.
We have had IIS servers run for years without a lot of maintenance.
Backward compatibility hasn't been too big of an issue.

Usability

Microsoft Internet Services (IIS) overall is a solid product and is used by a lot of enterprises. We're a heavy user and will continue to be a heavy user for our medium-size loads. Like other tools, it fits a good profile and we have gotten very good at selecting it for that profile.

Support Rating

The support for the tool can be pretty bleak. The savior is that there is a large customer community and users out there are vested in responding to and supporting each other. I've googled many solutions when needed to a problem I couldn't solve on my own or with Microsoft's help.

Alternatives Considered

Apache Web Server

Microsoft IIS stacked up well with Apache, but since we are a Microsoft shop primarily, we had more resources that were familiar with managing the operating system and the server itself. While there are some benefits to Apache, you can find most of them in Microsoft IIS if you configure it properly.

Other Software Used

Azure Active Directory, Azure Bot Service, Azure Logic Apps

Likelihood to Recommend

I would recommend it if you use a Windows environment and have to utilize a medium processing load. If you have high availability loads, I'd recommend a more simplified webserver like Nginix or Apache. They provide a better threading model for resources.

Microsoft IIS, a Solid Web Server

Overall Satisfaction with Microsoft IIS