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
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.
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.
Sitecore on the classical XP/XM stack, they don't seem to be bothered to update it to modern .NET, as the new products moved away from .NET (XM Cloud and co).
Microsoft still has stuff like Dynamics 365, running .NET Framework.
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.
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.