I do. As others have replied, Windows Server--including IIS, means you have a domain joined machine, likely with an SPN of HOST/MACHINE.DOMAIN.
Windows services and IIS App Pool Identities log in with an (g)MSA or virtual accounts (NT Service*) and you get a fully working and managed Kerberos experience without having to deal with 30, 60, 90 day password rotations.
Log into your MS SQL Server with Kerberos, log into some other webapp's oauth2 flow with Kerberos, etc, it all just works.
You can use WinRM with your native Windows shell without having to do anything special, and even technically bypass 2FA since that's just how it really works.
Can you do all this on Linux? Yes.
Will it ever be set up correctly? Depends where you work, but based on my experience so far, not likely.
I worked with customer's AD environments in the 2010's and I remember whiteboards of figuring out customer Kerberos config. "it all just works" is not my recollection of that 3-headed beast lmao.
Every large company big enough to host an intranet is running IIS somewhere, possibly everywhere. It integrates well with AD so some really complex tasks become stupid simple.
It's seeing less and less usage as the world moves to AWS which is equally stupid because you're tied to one vendor's proprietary products (Amazon) again. Except this time you don't own the hardware.
Public sector IT loves IIS. Check your municipality's tax or property website it's probably got .aspx scripts out the ass.
I've seen it hosting European web apps, public sector if I recall. Lots of bespoke .NET applications out there with SQL Server backends running entire local governments.
Asian countries especially China and Taiwan love IIS and use it to host anything and everything. This is a personal observation.
Sure the world has mostly moved on, but there's tons of legacy code out there that keeps cities and really important organizations humming that runs on IIS and it's never changing.
You think that's bad, there's still places out there running AS/400 stuff on the web, Lotus Notes, and Novell Groupwise (gasp).
Well its document management feature didn't used to have Anti-Virus support which caused me a load of problems back in the 90's when Word Macro viruses were common. :P
And as an ignoramus: what it is that you are supposed to be using nowadays?
Think in the context of a small company making enterprise .NET (framework) code where Windows is the world, cloud wouldn't fly with the customers, SOAP is still king and your one IT guy is too busy to notice anything happened after 2010. Suppose also that entire software rewrites are impossibly impractical, and that while you'd love to take some security gains, you just don't have the capacity to do configuration deep dives let alone to gamble on something complex like Kubernetes.
Yeah, I regularly speak to folks still running IIS on Windows Server. There are a lot of old apps out there, sadly. Some really, really important ones.
this is one of the funniest recurring threads on HN. developers finding out what other developers are requiring from their customers. Bonus points for developers finding out that non-cloud solutions still dominate some industries.
Cloud's got nothing to do with it. The thought of standing up a windows box to serve anything other than profiles and user surveillance is simply foreign. Budget webhosting has been a thing for a long time and standing up a *nix VM is also no big deal. In 25 years in industry I never once saw an IIS server used in the wild. shrug
Back in the early-2000s, I passed the Microsoft certification exam for IIS. I had never even heard of the product (I was told my company had some extra credits at the testing center, I was there taking another exam (Solaris 8 certification), so I figured why not?) I know, MCSE exams were notoriously simple back then, but good god - usually, for every question, 3 of the 4 possible answers didn't even make sense. Anyway, I figured there was no way IIS would last if any dipshit could become "certified" in the product.
That's the value add. Any dipshit can be trained in the Windows server stack, so you can staff your back office with dipshits. For a while in the early 2000s—before the cloud era—Windows was routinely found to have a lower TCO than Linux as a server OS for precisely this reason. More actual deployments too, especially in corporate intranets.
I do. As others have replied, Windows Server--including IIS, means you have a domain joined machine, likely with an SPN of HOST/MACHINE.DOMAIN. Windows services and IIS App Pool Identities log in with an (g)MSA or virtual accounts (NT Service*) and you get a fully working and managed Kerberos experience without having to deal with 30, 60, 90 day password rotations. Log into your MS SQL Server with Kerberos, log into some other webapp's oauth2 flow with Kerberos, etc, it all just works. You can use WinRM with your native Windows shell without having to do anything special, and even technically bypass 2FA since that's just how it really works.
Can you do all this on Linux? Yes. Will it ever be set up correctly? Depends where you work, but based on my experience so far, not likely.
> with Kerberos, etc, it all just works
I worked with customer's AD environments in the 2010's and I remember whiteboards of figuring out customer Kerberos config. "it all just works" is not my recollection of that 3-headed beast lmao.
Way, WAY too many corporate IT divisions.
Some banks still use IIS.
Every large company big enough to host an intranet is running IIS somewhere, possibly everywhere. It integrates well with AD so some really complex tasks become stupid simple.
It's seeing less and less usage as the world moves to AWS which is equally stupid because you're tied to one vendor's proprietary products (Amazon) again. Except this time you don't own the hardware.
Public sector IT loves IIS. Check your municipality's tax or property website it's probably got .aspx scripts out the ass.
I've seen it hosting European web apps, public sector if I recall. Lots of bespoke .NET applications out there with SQL Server backends running entire local governments.
Asian countries especially China and Taiwan love IIS and use it to host anything and everything. This is a personal observation.
Sure the world has mostly moved on, but there's tons of legacy code out there that keeps cities and really important organizations humming that runs on IIS and it's never changing.
You think that's bad, there's still places out there running AS/400 stuff on the web, Lotus Notes, and Novell Groupwise (gasp).
Heyyy what's wrong with novel groupwise?
Well its document management feature didn't used to have Anti-Virus support which caused me a load of problems back in the 90's when Word Macro viruses were common. :P
I've seen it used to deliver 'apps' that 90% of a business's employees use. (EX: Met/Team) in the Metrology (calibration) space.
Yep.
And as an ignoramus: what it is that you are supposed to be using nowadays?
Think in the context of a small company making enterprise .NET (framework) code where Windows is the world, cloud wouldn't fly with the customers, SOAP is still king and your one IT guy is too busy to notice anything happened after 2010. Suppose also that entire software rewrites are impossibly impractical, and that while you'd love to take some security gains, you just don't have the capacity to do configuration deep dives let alone to gamble on something complex like Kubernetes.
Yeah, I regularly speak to folks still running IIS on Windows Server. There are a lot of old apps out there, sadly. Some really, really important ones.
Amazingly some companies like Hyland still ship software that requires IIS. Bonus add are the pages and pages of setup instructions.
And NCR from my experience.
A lot of big corps still use it.
https://bloomberry.com/data/windows-server/
IIS also sits at the back of a many "modern" cloud web type services.
The entire solarwinds platform(barf)
Lots and lots
A lot of Microsoft devs know very little Linux historically as they used windows and are comfortable with it
Decreasing due to cloud and Nodejs takeup
SharePoint uses it extensively
I would say 75% of my webservers are IIS.
Nothing internet facing mind.
but...why?
Really simple.
I read the prerequisites of whatever software im asked to install and do what it says.
I'm not spending the next 3 years of my life trying to make some monitoring platform run on WebLogic i have other jobs to do in 4-8-12 hours.
this is one of the funniest recurring threads on HN. developers finding out what other developers are requiring from their customers. Bonus points for developers finding out that non-cloud solutions still dominate some industries.
Cloud's got nothing to do with it. The thought of standing up a windows box to serve anything other than profiles and user surveillance is simply foreign. Budget webhosting has been a thing for a long time and standing up a *nix VM is also no big deal. In 25 years in industry I never once saw an IIS server used in the wild. shrug
I'm surprised by this, maybe its industry specific.
An 80:20 split of windows server to everything else has been pretty common in the areas I've worked both as a <10 day contactor and as a FTE.
Yes, but typically just internal corporate intraweb stuff from what I've seen.
The text uses target.com as a placeholder but they actually also have an IIS blue screen: https://knslsd.target.com/
Tons of the Navy's public websites still run on it.
Back in the early-2000s, I passed the Microsoft certification exam for IIS. I had never even heard of the product (I was told my company had some extra credits at the testing center, I was there taking another exam (Solaris 8 certification), so I figured why not?) I know, MCSE exams were notoriously simple back then, but good god - usually, for every question, 3 of the 4 possible answers didn't even make sense. Anyway, I figured there was no way IIS would last if any dipshit could become "certified" in the product.
That's the value add. Any dipshit can be trained in the Windows server stack, so you can staff your back office with dipshits. For a while in the early 2000s—before the cloud era—Windows was routinely found to have a lower TCO than Linux as a server OS for precisely this reason. More actual deployments too, especially in corporate intranets.