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  5. AWS CloudFormation vs Microsoft IIS

AWS CloudFormation vs Microsoft IIS

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

AWS CloudFormation
AWS CloudFormation
Stacks1.6K
Followers1.3K
Votes88
Microsoft IIS
Microsoft IIS
Stacks15.5K
Followers7.7K
Votes236

AWS CloudFormation vs Microsoft IIS: What are the differences?

Introduction

AWS CloudFormation and Microsoft IIS are two different technologies that are used in the field of cloud computing. While AWS CloudFormation is a service provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS) to manage and provision cloud resources, Microsoft IIS (Internet Information Services) is a web server software developed by Microsoft.

Key differences between AWS CloudFormation and Microsoft IIS

  1. Type of Service: AWS CloudFormation is a cloud infrastructure management service, whereas Microsoft IIS is a web server software.
  2. Platform Compatibility: AWS CloudFormation is platform agnostic and can be used with any underlying infrastructure, while Microsoft IIS is specific to Windows operating systems only.
  3. Scope: AWS CloudFormation focuses on infrastructure as code and provides a way to automate the creation, management, and deletion of AWS resources, while Microsoft IIS is a web server software that primarily focuses on hosting websites and applications.
  4. Orchestration: AWS CloudFormation allows for the orchestration of complex cloud environments by defining resources, dependencies, and configurations in a template, while Microsoft IIS does not provide native orchestration capabilities for managing multiple instances or environments.
  5. Portability: CloudFormation templates can be easily replicated and used across different AWS accounts and regions, making it highly portable. On the other hand, Microsoft IIS configurations are tied to the specific server and are not as portable.
  6. Deployment: AWS CloudFormation enables repeatable and automated deployments through the use of JSON or YAML templates, allowing for version control and template reuse. In contrast, Microsoft IIS deployments are typically done manually or through scripting, offering less automation and repeatability.

In summary, AWS CloudFormation is a cloud infrastructure management service that focuses on infrastructure orchestration and automation, while Microsoft IIS is a web server software that is specific to Windows operating systems and primarily used for hosting websites and applications.

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Advice on AWS CloudFormation, Microsoft IIS

Timothy
Timothy

SRE

Mar 20, 2020

Decided

I personally am not a huge fan of vendor lock in for multiple reasons:

  • I've seen cost saving moves to the cloud end up costing a fortune and trapping companies due to over utilization of cloud specific features.
  • I've seen S3 failures nearly take down half the internet.
  • I've seen companies get stuck in the cloud because they aren't built cloud agnostic.

I choose to use terraform for my cloud provisioning for these reasons:

  • It's cloud agnostic so I can use it no matter where I am.
  • It isn't difficult to use and uses a relatively easy to read language.
  • It tests infrastructure before running it, and enables me to see and keep changes up to date.
  • It runs from the same CLI I do most of my CM work from.
385k views385k
Comments
greg00m
greg00m

Mar 9, 2020

Needs advice

I am diving into web development, both front and back end. I feel comfortable with administration, scripting and moderate coding in bash, Python and C++, but I am also a Windows fan (i love inner conflict). What are the votes on web servers? IIS is expensive and restrictive (has Windows adoption of open source changed this?) Apache has the history but seems to be at the root of most of my Infosec issues, and I know nothing about nginx (is it too new to rely on?). And no, I don't know what I want to do on the web explicitly, but hosting and data storage (both cloud and tape) are possibilities.
Ready, aim fire!

766k views766k
Comments
Daniel
Daniel

May 4, 2020

Decided

Because Pulumi uses real programming languages, you can actually write abstractions for your infrastructure code, which is incredibly empowering. You still 'describe' your desired state, but by having a programming language at your fingers, you can factor out patterns, and package it up for easier consumption.

426k views426k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

AWS CloudFormation
AWS CloudFormation
Microsoft IIS
Microsoft IIS

You can use AWS CloudFormation’s sample templates or create your own templates to describe the AWS resources, and any associated dependencies or runtime parameters, required to run your application. You don’t need to figure out the order in which AWS services need to be provisioned or the subtleties of how to make those dependencies work.

Internet Information Services (IIS) for Windows Server is a flexible, secure and manageable Web server for hosting anything on the Web. From media streaming to web applications, IIS's scalable and open architecture is ready to handle the most demanding tasks.

AWS CloudFormation comes with the following ready-to-run sample templates: WordPress (blog),Tracks (project tracking), Gollum (wiki used by GitHub), Drupal (content management), Joomla (content management), Insoshi (social apps), Redmine (project mgmt);No Need to Reinvent the Wheel – A template can be used repeatedly to create identical copies of the same stack (or to use as a foundation to start a new stack);Transparent and Open – Templates are simple JSON formatted text files that can be placed under your normal source control mechanisms, stored in private or public locations such as Amazon S3 and exchanged via email.;Declarative and Flexible – To create the infrastructure you want, you enumerate what AWS resources, configuration values and interconnections you need in a template and then let AWS CloudFormation do the rest with a few simple clicks in the AWS Management Console, via the command line tools or by calling the APIs.
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Statistics
Stacks
1.6K
Stacks
15.5K
Followers
1.3K
Followers
7.7K
Votes
88
Votes
236
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 43
    Automates infrastructure deployments
  • 21
    Declarative infrastructure and deployment
  • 13
    No more clicking around
  • 3
    Infrastructure as code
  • 3
    Atomic
Cons
  • 4
    Brittle
  • 2
    No RBAC and policies in templates
Pros
  • 83
    Great with .net
  • 55
    I'm forced to use iis
  • 27
    Use nginx
  • 18
    Azure integration
  • 15
    Best for ms technologyes ms bullshit
Cons
  • 1
    Hard to set up

What are some alternatives to AWS CloudFormation, Microsoft IIS?

NGINX

NGINX

nginx [engine x] is an HTTP and reverse proxy server, as well as a mail proxy server, written by Igor Sysoev. According to Netcraft nginx served or proxied 30.46% of the top million busiest sites in Jan 2018.

Apache HTTP Server

Apache HTTP Server

The Apache HTTP Server is a powerful and flexible HTTP/1.1 compliant web server. Originally designed as a replacement for the NCSA HTTP Server, it has grown to be the most popular web server on the Internet.

Unicorn

Unicorn

Unicorn is an HTTP server for Rack applications designed to only serve fast clients on low-latency, high-bandwidth connections and take advantage of features in Unix/Unix-like kernels. Slow clients should only be served by placing a reverse proxy capable of fully buffering both the the request and response in between Unicorn and slow clients.

Apache Tomcat

Apache Tomcat

Apache Tomcat powers numerous large-scale, mission-critical web applications across a diverse range of industries and organizations.

Passenger

Passenger

Phusion Passenger is a web server and application server, designed to be fast, robust and lightweight. It takes a lot of complexity out of deploying web apps, adds powerful enterprise-grade features that are useful in production, and makes administration much easier and less complex.

Gunicorn

Gunicorn

Gunicorn is a pre-fork worker model ported from Ruby's Unicorn project. The Gunicorn server is broadly compatible with various web frameworks, simply implemented, light on server resources, and fairly speedy.

Jetty

Jetty

Jetty is used in a wide variety of projects and products, both in development and production. Jetty can be easily embedded in devices, tools, frameworks, application servers, and clusters. See the Jetty Powered page for more uses of Jetty.

Packer

Packer

Packer automates the creation of any type of machine image. It embraces modern configuration management by encouraging you to use automated scripts to install and configure the software within your Packer-made images.

lighttpd

lighttpd

lighttpd has a very low memory footprint compared to other webservers and takes care of cpu-load. Its advanced feature-set (FastCGI, CGI, Auth, Output-Compression, URL-Rewriting and many more) make lighttpd the perfect webserver-software for every server that suffers load problems.

Swoole

Swoole

It is an open source high-performance network framework using an event-driven, asynchronous, non-blocking I/O model which makes it scalable and efficient.

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