Chapter 5: Internet Information Services

Websites and web services are used for everything these days. With the evolution of cloud services, we are accessing more and more via web browsers than we ever have before. The cloud can mean very different things to different people, but what I see most commonly in Enterprise situations is the creation of private clouds. This generally means a collection of web servers that are being used to serve up web applications for the company's user population to work from. Sometimes, the private cloud is onsite in a company's data center; sometimes, it is in a colocated data center facility; and sometimes, it is a combination of a local data center and a true cloud web service provider such as Azure. Whatever defines a private cloud for you, one variable is the same: your cloud includes web servers that need to be managed and administered.

For any Microsoft-centric shop, your web servers should be running Windows Server with the Internet...