Item: Microsoft IIS
Rating: 6
Author: Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Microsoft IIS

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We have a couple of legacy applications that have backend written in .NET Core & frontend in Angular. Due to the .NET Core part, as well as some other reasons, it was decided that the applications would be hosted on Windows Server VMs, both frontend & backend.

It means we use Microsoft IIS to host the frontend, with redirect routes for backend API calls.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Native integration with Windows Server
Intuitive enough for static web pages hosting
Good enough URL rewrite rules to support hosting both frontend & backend on the same VM, while avoiding CORS issue at the same time

Cons

Virtually no infra-as-code support
Powershell API to automate CI/CD is quite limited
Troubleshooting is quite cumbersome, with lots of guesswork

Return on Investment

Virtually zero effort required to setup on Windows Server
Dev env can get up & running very quickly
Windows GUI makes things much easier for beginners

Usability

In general, Microsoft IIS is an alright product. It comes natively with Windows Server. It has good enough GUI to set things up & tweak things around.

Once properly setup, it runs stably enough.

And with enough Powershell magic, having a CI/CD pipeline to automatically deploy a new version of the application is doable.

Alternatives Considered

Apache Tomcat and Apache HTTP Server

Tomcat & HTTP Server would be naturally choice on Linux servers. In fact, they're usually embedded so you don't even have to worry about setting up a web container.

Obviously, setting them up on a Windows server involves more effort than "just" turning on Microsoft IIS.

Microsoft IIS's URL rewrite capabilities would be quite helpful in certain situations.

Key Insights

Do you think Microsoft IIS delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Microsoft IIS's feature set?

Yes

Did Microsoft IIS live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Microsoft IIS go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Microsoft IIS again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Apache HTTP Server, Apache Tomcat, Amazon CloudFront

Likelihood to Recommend

Tbvh, I would only recommend Microsoft IIS if you have specific requirements to host something on Windows Server.

If it's Linux environment, there are certainly much better container products to use.

Even on Windows, those alternative containers are still available, making Microsoft IIS much less appealing.

Anyways, tight integration with Windows & Powershell is certainly an advantage for Microsoft IIS, if itself & those mentioned tools fit into your tech landscape.

Microsoft IIS Feature Ratings

Comments

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Microsoft IIS - Native Windows Web Server