Microsoft IIS vs. TIBCO ActiveSpaces

IIS as a web application server is perfectly suited for .net, .net core, asp.net applications. Our core ESB runs on IIS and has hundreds of gigabytes of data moved through it every day spread across millions of transactions. We have other mission critical applications that deliver our results to patients and doctors relying on IIS web application servers. If you stay in the Microsoft development stack, IIS is a top tier, efficient, and reliable web server.

Incentivized

TIBCO ActiveSpaces is only suited in the company where Tibco suites have been already used, the license cost is not a concern, it is only required for data caching purposes and only works in the client/server mode for middle-sizes of data. If the expectation is data cache + distributed computation or embedded IMDG is also one requirement or the data cluster needs span multiple data centers, other light-weight OpenSource IMDG solutions should be considered

Incentivized

• A big advantage that we use all the time is reviewing the logs that automatically get generated in IIS. It has helped us troubleshoot various problems in our applications over the years.
• IIS integrates really well with Visual Studio and TFS. We are able to quickly deploy new applications and changes to applications when requested by the business.
• IIS has proven that it is easy to configure and maintain with minimal effort.

Incentivized

• Easy to scale
• Support for many hardware and software platforms
• Easy to implement

Incentivized

• For some web applications, it takes additional time to configure IIS to make a website work.
• IIS logging - it is not the strongest side of the product.
• Compared to Apache or Nginx, IIS uses way more system resources.
• Even with regular patches, IIS has many vulnerabilities.

Incentivized

• TIBCO ActiveSpaces Tuple-based data structure is not flexible enough to support customized native data objects.
• There is no secondary index option.
• Doesn't provide "predicate based In-Grid distributed search and result aggregation."
• only can be used as data cache, the node's only contribute memory but can not use the data partition owner node's computation power to apply the distributed computation customized by the user.
• Cross data center replication (geographically) is a pain.
• Encounter the performance issue when the data volume is huge, even according to the architecture design, linear scaling up should not have that issue.

Incentivized

We have no intention to replace all applications running on top of the IIS platform. Not all applications support other platforms and not all support staff are skilled in Linux/Apache platform support. Whereas IIS may not be the best performing or most secure web platform available, for the aforementioned reasons, it is impossible not to continue use of this product.

Incentivized

In general, Microsoft IIS is an alright product. It comes natively with Windows Server. It has good enough GUI to set things up & tweak things around. Once properly setup, it runs stably enough. And with enough Powershell magic, having a CI/CD pipeline to automatically deploy a new version of the application is doable.

Incentivized

TIBCO ActiveSpaces is easy to install and integrate with other product suites. It is easy to understand and implement as well. TIBCO ActiveSpaces supports multiple databases for storing the data(we are using Oracle Database). All the master data related to the users is being stored using TIBCO ActiveSpaces which keeps the data in memory and help to retrieve it quickly. It has helped to prevent concurrent login sessions by the same user as session details are stored in TIBCO ActiveSpaces and we override the existing user session with the new session details.

Incentivized

ARR (application request routing) in Microsoft IIS Server enables the web-admins to increase the web app reliability and availability through the rule based routing and load balancing of HTTP requests which in turn provides highly available server. IIS 7.0 Manager also provides kernel as well as user mode caching for faster performance and in case if the server fails, the IIS server has good amount of details logged in its log files which help understand and debug the cause quickly. Load balancing facilitates IIS server to fight against availability issues.

Incentivized

In my experience, I have never had significant issues with IIS performance. Sometimes I've experienced issues with loading time, but it is mostly related to the web site code. However Amazon, Microsoft and Google providing free cloud services with very limited resources, and in that scenario, "heavy" websites on IIS could be the issue. In other situations - performance is good.

Incentivized

As mentioned earlier there is so much documentation or guides or stack overflow questions out there that someone will have faced the same or very similar scenario to what you are going through that you will almost certainly find a solution to what you are after.

Incentivized

On Windows, Microsoft IIS is easier to implement and maintain than Apache web service. Normally if you need to host PHP or other apache native content on a Windows server, it's recommended to use WAMP or equivalent software to simplify the installation, administration, and configuration of resources. However, you can use Microsoft IIS and other web services on the same server, taking care to keep separate folders and port usage for each system.

Incentivized

Before using TIBCO ActiveSpaces, we were storing all the data in Oracle Database and due to large volumes of data response time was more and overall performance had reduced. With the introduction of TIBCO ActiveSpaces, we moved the master data to TIBCO ActiveSpaces for storing data which needed frequent access in memory for faster retrieval. This improved the performance significantly and also made managing data easier.

Incentivized

Microsoft IIS Server is scalable if the underlying server configuration is done correctly. Use x64 edition v/s 32bit and using 32bit mode application pools are some of the tweaks to be done to make the IIS server scalable. There are too many small configurations need to be carried out in order to make a highly scalable IIS server hence not giving full score in this area.

Incentivized

• Speed of development. You don't need to be an expert to expose your website through some DNS
• Robust, there has never been any downtime because of IIS itself.
• The ease of use can have (and has had) some negative impact because it's too easy to implement something, and then forget. When a server is taken down, those unthoughtful implementations come to light the hard way.

Incentivized

• Developers with basic knowledge of TIBCO and general data knowledge can easily design and develop an ActiveSpaces based cached solution. As the ActiveSpaces concepts are very simple and easy to understand.
• Some business areas can predict the high influx of a service usage during a certain period. Business will be highly rewarded if they can identify these business areas and provide a cached solution using TIBCO AS.
• Again, this is not a TIBCO ActiveSpaces only advantage and this is true for any/all caching products.
• Some examples for the previous points are
• a. telecom company pre-loading (eager load) customer's usage for the last month, right before releasing/issuing the bills to the customers.
• b. Airline industry loading the customer's itinerary a week before his travel start date. Hence the last minute scrambling to fetch the customer's itinerary travel plans can be avoided.

Incentivized