this post was submitted on 03 Apr 2024
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Non-MS Web servers and services have evolved significantly since IIS was originally introduced. Back in the mid 90s when the web was growing up authentication was significantly more primitive. Active Directory didn't exist yet. OpenSSL didn't even exist. Linux as an accepted business server was much more rare. Your options for OS were Windows, IBM (AS400 or AIX), SCO Unix, Netware, AT&T or Berkley Unix, and a few others mainframe OSes.
Among other things, IIS allowed a way to leverage existing user directories for auth on top of an OS you already had deployed and supported in your org. It was a simple, primitive, horrible insecure and exciting time.
Dude, I learned how to write HTML in the 90's and even back then everyone knew that apache2 was clearly fucking superior. IIS has been a joke since the 90's when it was released.
I remember trying to get it to work with MySQL, failing, and moving to apache.
I had to do it for work at some point in the late 90s and IIS did actually had a pretty good configuration application whilst Apache was all text configuration files.
The problem was that IIS compared to Apache was heavier, less performant and scalable, not as stable and it required Windows (if I remember it correctly it was even heavilly tied to other MS software such as their database).
Apache did require a bit more expert knowledge to get going, but in all else it was already superior to IIS.
I'm surprised anybody still uses IIS.
Except that's not what was happening. IIS came after Apache and played a catch up for a while. It almost surpassed Apache in 2007, but GFC happened and its popularity dropped rapidly. If not for GFC, there would be no Apache today.
Nginx also increased in popularity around that time, giving more competition to IIS. Most of the web stacks I've seen recently are running Nginx.
(I'm an HAProxy man myself.)
NGINX is rarely used as a web server, it's usually used as a reverse proxy, cache and SSL terminator. Just like HAProxy, Varnish, etc.
How are we defining a web server? Because to me it's "the thing listening on Port 80 or 443 that responds to HTTP requests."
And, yes, I know they do more than that, but they also do those things quite a bit.
There's a pretty clear distinction between a web server and a reverse proxy if you work in the field.
I've got over 20 years of experience in the field. I've configured both of them as reverse proxies and web servers.
If Nginx is accepting connections on ports 80 and 443, terminating SSL, and responding to HTTP requests, that makes it a web server. Especially if it's responding with static content.
Oh my...
I'm honestly not even sure what the author's point is since IIS isn't exactly popular, or even any sort of default these days.
I build using Microsoft technologies, and haven't touched IIs for more than 8 years. I almost entirely use OSS projects, on linux.
From writing, to testing, to IaC, to the runtime, the server OS, the webserver, the proxy....etc is all FOSS projects these days.
The only proprietary things I used is the hosting provider itself and their services, and my IDE.
All that said I want to see Microsoft to succeed simply to spite AWS. We have to have competition, and for the love of god I do not need AWS taking over more of the ecosystem. More competitors more better.
(+Solaris, HP/UX, DG/UX, Irix, etc)