Microsoft IIS vs Websphere Liberty

Overview

Microsoft IIS

Stacks15.5K

Followers7.7K

Votes236

Websphere Liberty

Stacks39

Followers93

Votes0

Microsoft IIS vs Websphere Liberty: What are the differences?

Introduction

Microsoft IIS and Websphere Liberty are both popular web server software platforms used to host websites and applications. While they have similarities in terms of their purpose, there are key differences that set them apart.

Architecture:

Microsoft IIS is a web server software developed by Microsoft, primarily for Windows operating systems. It follows a modular architecture, where core modules provide basic web server functionality, and additional modules can be added to enhance the server's capabilities.

Websphere Liberty, on the other hand, is a lightweight and flexible application server developed by IBM. It is built using the Eclipse OpenJ9 Java Virtual Machine (JVM) and follows a microservices architecture, allowing developers to choose and deploy only the required components for their applications.
Platform Compatibility:

Microsoft IIS is compatible only with Windows operating systems, providing seamless integration with other Microsoft products. It leverages Windows-specific technologies and features, such as the .NET framework, making it ideal for organizations using Microsoft technologies.

Websphere Liberty, in contrast, is platform-independent and can be deployed on various operating systems, including Windows, Linux, and macOS. It offers greater flexibility in terms of platform choice and can be used in heterogeneous environments.
Scalability:

Microsoft IIS is known for its scalability features, allowing for the efficient handling of large-scale web applications. It supports various optimization techniques, load balancing, and high-availability configurations to handle increased traffic and ensure system performance.

Websphere Liberty also provides scalability options, but it focuses more on lightweight and efficient resource utilization. It is designed to quickly adapt to the changing demands of microservices-based architectures, providing an agile and responsive environment for application scaling.
Deployment Options:

Microsoft IIS provides a simple and straightforward deployment process, making it easy to install and configure. It can be managed through a graphical user interface (GUI) or command-line interface (CLI), offering different levels of control and convenience for administrators.

Websphere Liberty supports various deployment options, including traditional on-premises installations and cloud-based deployments. It offers integration with Docker containers and Kubernetes orchestration, enabling seamless deployment and management in containerized environments.
Licensing:

Microsoft IIS requires a Windows Server license, which may incur additional costs for organizations already using Windows-based infrastructure. Additional licenses may also be required for certain features and functionalities.

Websphere Liberty follows a more flexible licensing model, offering both open-source and commercial options. It provides a free-to-use Community Edition with some limitations, while the full-featured version comes with a commercially licensed support option.
Development Ecosystem:

Microsoft IIS is tightly integrated with Microsoft's development ecosystem, offering extensive support for technologies like ASP.NET, .NET Core, and Visual Studio. It provides a comprehensive set of tools, libraries, and frameworks that aid in web application development on the Microsoft platform.

Websphere Liberty embraces open standards and supports a wide range of programming languages, frameworks, and technologies, including Java EE and MicroProfile. It provides developers with flexibility and choice, enabling them to leverage a broader ecosystem of tools and libraries.

In Summary, Microsoft IIS is a Windows-based web server with strong integration with Microsoft technologies, while Websphere Liberty is a platform-independent application server focused on microservices architecture and flexible deployment options.

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Advice on Microsoft IIS, Websphere Liberty

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

Detailed Comparison

Microsoft IIS	Websphere Liberty
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.	It is very lightweight profile of WebSphere Application Server. It is a flexible and dynamic profile of WAS which enables the WAS server to deploy only required custom features instead of deploying a big set of available JEE components.
-	lightweight profile; deploy only required custom features
Statistics
Stacks 15.5K	Stacks 39
Followers 7.7K	Followers 93
Votes 236	Votes 0
Pros & Cons
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	No community feedback yet
Integrations
No integrations available	Docker Chef Jenkins

What are some alternatives to Microsoft IIS, Websphere Liberty?

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

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

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 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 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.

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

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.

Puma

Unlike other Ruby Webservers, Puma was built for speed and parallelism. Puma is a small library that provides a very fast and concurrent HTTP 1.1 server for Ruby web applications.

Related Comparisons

Microsoft IIS vs Websphere Liberty: What are the differences?

Introduction

Architecture:

Microsoft IIS is a web server software developed by Microsoft, primarily for Windows operating systems. It follows a modular architecture, where core modules provide basic web server functionality, and additional modules can be added to enhance the server's capabilities.

Websphere Liberty, on the other hand, is a lightweight and flexible application server developed by IBM. It is built using the Eclipse OpenJ9 Java Virtual Machine (JVM) and follows a microservices architecture, allowing developers to choose and deploy only the required components for their applications.
Platform Compatibility:

Microsoft IIS is compatible only with Windows operating systems, providing seamless integration with other Microsoft products. It leverages Windows-specific technologies and features, such as the .NET framework, making it ideal for organizations using Microsoft technologies.

Websphere Liberty, in contrast, is platform-independent and can be deployed on various operating systems, including Windows, Linux, and macOS. It offers greater flexibility in terms of platform choice and can be used in heterogeneous environments.
Scalability:

Microsoft IIS is known for its scalability features, allowing for the efficient handling of large-scale web applications. It supports various optimization techniques, load balancing, and high-availability configurations to handle increased traffic and ensure system performance.

Websphere Liberty also provides scalability options, but it focuses more on lightweight and efficient resource utilization. It is designed to quickly adapt to the changing demands of microservices-based architectures, providing an agile and responsive environment for application scaling.
Deployment Options:

Microsoft IIS provides a simple and straightforward deployment process, making it easy to install and configure. It can be managed through a graphical user interface (GUI) or command-line interface (CLI), offering different levels of control and convenience for administrators.

Websphere Liberty supports various deployment options, including traditional on-premises installations and cloud-based deployments. It offers integration with Docker containers and Kubernetes orchestration, enabling seamless deployment and management in containerized environments.
Licensing:

Microsoft IIS requires a Windows Server license, which may incur additional costs for organizations already using Windows-based infrastructure. Additional licenses may also be required for certain features and functionalities.

Websphere Liberty follows a more flexible licensing model, offering both open-source and commercial options. It provides a free-to-use Community Edition with some limitations, while the full-featured version comes with a commercially licensed support option.
Development Ecosystem:

Microsoft IIS is tightly integrated with Microsoft's development ecosystem, offering extensive support for technologies like ASP.NET, .NET Core, and Visual Studio. It provides a comprehensive set of tools, libraries, and frameworks that aid in web application development on the Microsoft platform.

Websphere Liberty embraces open standards and supports a wide range of programming languages, frameworks, and technologies, including Java EE and MicroProfile. It provides developers with flexibility and choice, enabling them to leverage a broader ecosystem of tools and libraries.

Microsoft IIS vs Websphere Liberty

Overview