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by taspeotis 4219 days ago
> Shall be interesting to see how this affects IIS market share in 5-10 years time.

Well OWIN supports self-hosting so perhaps this will not bode well for IIS outside of enterprise environments.

3 comments

Asp.Net vNext can be run from Nginx or Apache, i think that will have a bigger influence then selfhosting.
From what I can tell, the IIS team is embracing OWIN. Be sure to check out Project Helios (http://www.infoq.com/news/2014/02/helios). *Helios can be compared to OpenResty in the sense that the application runs directly on-top of the (core) web server, instead of a plugin/pipeline.

In my humble opinion, self-hosting is useful as long as it's feasible to reinvent the web server wheel. In terms of IIS that can include url rewriting, caching, compression, performance tracing, critical error logging, request logging, endpoint configuration including SSL (and SNI), zero downtime deployments, graceful shutdowns and much more.

The programming tendencies nowadays is to build highly specialized software (high cohesion), with only the needed dependencies (low coupling) and a small surface area to promote faster iterations (micro services).

Based on the above observation, the approach of Microsoft to release and endorse a cross-platform <core> .NET is commendable and is exactly what we need right now.

There's much to say about the downsides of the bring-your-own-x composition approach, but I truly believe the issues we face today will be addressed over time as the discipline and dedication of the programming community as a whole increase due to the increase in responsibility.

I wonder whether or not this was difficult due to internal politics. I doubt IIS team is too happy about this.
I guess IIS and Windows Server have an important role providing high performance HTTP service hosting nodes in Azure. If this effort from the .NET team can revive the future of .NET server-side development, the server team can capitalize on the integration of the managed stack on top of the kernel-mode http.sys web tier, to provide a first class hosting environment for ASP.NET applications on the Azure cloud. Microsoft is the one hosting provider in the world who can scale out Windows servers without having to worry about license costs.
Is there any anti-competitive laws they'd have to adhere to to take away that "advantage"?
Amazon and Google don't have to license their cloud technology, so why would Microsoft (be forced to adjust license costs. or to license it at all)? (Unless MS were to become the dominant hosting provider and some anti-monopoly law or regulation were to come into play, but right now they are far from there.) Licensing IIS is a side business to the cloud hosting business.