Windows Server 8 Beta is here!

I am excited for our customers to finally download Windows Server 8 beta and see what we have been working on. 

When we first started working on Windows Server 8, we wanted to make sure that we would deliver on some of the key customer asks in the areas of performance, security, scalability and manageability.  Naturally, many of our IIS 8.0 investments focused around these areas and while doing so, IIS 8.0 became the most cloud optimized web server that we have ever shipped.  

Its performance and scalability improvements are so significant that not only the customers will be able to measure the improvements, but they will be able to feel them.  The secure site density on IIS 8.0 has increased so substantially that we now have to use a different unit of measure to count how many secure sites we can configure - and we drastically simplified the management experience.  We also made IIS 8.0 more secure by providing ways to dynamically restrict access to the web and FTP servers based on the access patterns.  

In addition, we have looked forward to ensured that IIS8.0 is ready for the advancements in the hardware and that our customers are ready to fully take advantage of them.   We added a support for SNI (Server Name Indication) and WebSockets, as they will change how we create secure sites and build new modern web applications that can communicate in full-duplex and bi-directional.

For additional list of features and documentations, please refer to the learn section of the iis.net and TechNet.   And be sure to try out Windows Server 8 beta and give us feedback.  We would love to hear your thoughts on how we can improve IIS.