I really like the IIS7 team at Microsoft. They're cool people, but the what I like is that IIS7 is so freaking modular (I've talked about this at conferences before when showing how to use PHP and Ruby under IIS7 using FastCGI) that the group keeps bringing out new functionality as "OOB" or Out Of Band releases.
Bill Staples as a good post on how IIS7 ships software now. There's a big list of all the Release to Web (RTW) modules for IIS7. I demo'ed a the Bit Rate Throttler at TechEd and talked about it in a post on"Squeezing the most out of IIS7 Media Bit Rate Throttling which can help people save bandwidth money while hosting downloadable files/media.
This week the IIS7 team put out three new preview releases for download.
Application Request Routing is interesting. At first I thought it was like NLB (Network Load Balancing), that feature of NT 4.0 that used to be called "Wolfpack." I figured that the great Load Balancing Wars of the '90s were won, and the winner was hardware. I've used Cisco LocalDirector and F5's BigIP in my previous jobs.
ARR is basically a proxy module with load balancing capability that does its routing at Layer 7, rather than Layer 4. That means you make decisions at the HTTP level rather than the IP level. It sits on top of the URL rewrite module, so you can write routing or load balancing rules that can key off of HTTP Headers or Server Vars. You can do Client Affinity via cookie to differentiate between clients behind NAT. These rules mean it could compliment a system that has an existing hardware load balancer.
If you're familiar with Apache, IIS7's ARR Module kind of combines the functionality you'd find in modproxy, modloadbalance, modproxyhttp along with some other goodness.
It's also a nice reverse proxy if you've ever wanted to do have a smarter IIS7 app router in your home to sit on the outside of your network and route traffic to machines or services inside.
For example, this screenshot shows a routing condition where we want to route folks who have .NET 3.5 on their systems to a separate server. Perhaps a beta site, or a site that has ClickOnce apps or some different functionality. It's totally up to you. You could route folks with certain cookie values, browsers, or based on path requested.
If we had 3 machines in the farm, one IIS7+ARR for routing in front and two other IIS7 machines behind it, I could write a rule that said "don't route requests for images." In this example, I'll have the /images folder served by the ARR machine up front instead.
It also has Health Monitoring to check on boxes being down, and you can decide what "healthy" means to you.
ARR is a free download and it plus into IIS7 Manager using the new UI extensibility stuff in IIS7, so it just looks like part of IIS and is managed the same way you manage everything else.
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Check 'em out. I'm looking into how I can use ARR to expose my internal Subversion server in a more secure and easily configurable way.
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