IIS on prem to hosted migration
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Re: How would you move an IIS workload from on site to a VPS
I'd honestly have to gather more info before I say one way or another. Slowing down and thinking about it, I believe this app only exists in inetput and is asp.net... I'd have to jump into their server and take a look.
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The cost of hosted Windows is extremely high compared to anything else. Generally around double, just for apples to apples, and often quadruple once you account for the additional resources often needed to accommodate Windows systems. In some cases, the licensing cost of Windows alone can exceed the cost of the VPS hosting.
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@scottalanmiller said in IIS on prem to hosted migration:
The cost of hosted Windows is extremely high compared to anything else. Generally around double, just for apples to apples, and often quadruple once you account for the additional resources often needed to accommodate Windows systems. In some cases, the licensing cost of Windows alone can exceed the cost of the VPS hosting.
I've been doing some web searching and have found very few helpful things about the migration. Just lots of migration tools for convenience, but nothing that is manual so I can actually understand what is needed should I not have a convenient tool. More importantly, to fully understand how the process works.
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ASP.NET is available on non-Windows platforms, so there is a possibility to move it to Linux or something that isn't Windows. Microsoft has their own project for this, plus there is the open source Mono project that has been around since the earliest days of .NET. ASP.NET apps tend to be able to be moved to Linux, whereas many .NET desktop apps cannot because they make Windows system calls directly which, obviously, Linux does not have.
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@bbigford said in IIS on prem to hosted migration:
@scottalanmiller said in IIS on prem to hosted migration:
The cost of hosted Windows is extremely high compared to anything else. Generally around double, just for apples to apples, and often quadruple once you account for the additional resources often needed to accommodate Windows systems. In some cases, the licensing cost of Windows alone can exceed the cost of the VPS hosting.
I've been doing some web searching and have found very few helpful things about the migration. Just lots of migration tools for convenience, but nothing that is manual so I can actually understand what is needed should I not have a convenient tool. More importantly, to fully understand how the process works.
Welcome to Windows, IIS and .NET. All three are hard and complicated for reasons no one knows. Having worked with many alternatives to all three, it is always shocking that any of them can be has complicated as they are. There is a reason that we warn so heavily against companies writing in house code using any of these, even when it isn't strictly locking them into the tech, it effectively does so. Add to this the tendency to disastrously choose MS SQL Server as a datastore and the problems just skyrocket.
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@scottalanmiller said in IIS on prem to hosted migration:
@bbigford said in IIS on prem to hosted migration:
@scottalanmiller said in IIS on prem to hosted migration:
The cost of hosted Windows is extremely high compared to anything else. Generally around double, just for apples to apples, and often quadruple once you account for the additional resources often needed to accommodate Windows systems. In some cases, the licensing cost of Windows alone can exceed the cost of the VPS hosting.
I've been doing some web searching and have found very few helpful things about the migration. Just lots of migration tools for convenience, but nothing that is manual so I can actually understand what is needed should I not have a convenient tool. More importantly, to fully understand how the process works.
Welcome to Windows, IIS and .NET. All three are hard and complicated for reasons no one knows. Having worked with many alternatives to all three, it is always shocking that any of them can be has complicated as they are. There is a reason that we warn so heavily against companies writing in house code using any of these, even when it isn't strictly locking them into the tech, it effectively does so. Add to this the tendency to disastrously choose MS SQL Server as a datastore and the problems just skyrocket.
I've wondered why some companies choose to limit themselves right off the bat. I doubt they are getting any kickback from Microsoft. All they are doing is adding to the cost of their product. Even if their product is free, their product now carries a very high cost (compared to using Linux, Apache, and MariaDB/Postgre, etc). Also inadvertently makes supporting it more difficult as you don't have as many options for backups, etc.
I thought maybe the limiting was just due to hiring developers that have only dealt with MS products, but that doesn't seem logical, because the company should hire people who either want to learn open sourced products, or people who already know them.
I must be missing something.
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@scottalanmiller said in IIS on prem to hosted migration:
@bbigford said in IIS on prem to hosted migration:
@scottalanmiller said in IIS on prem to hosted migration:
The cost of hosted Windows is extremely high compared to anything else. Generally around double, just for apples to apples, and often quadruple once you account for the additional resources often needed to accommodate Windows systems. In some cases, the licensing cost of Windows alone can exceed the cost of the VPS hosting.
I've been doing some web searching and have found very few helpful things about the migration. Just lots of migration tools for convenience, but nothing that is manual so I can actually understand what is needed should I not have a convenient tool. More importantly, to fully understand how the process works.
Welcome to Windows, IIS and .NET. All three are hard and complicated for reasons no one knows. Having worked with many alternatives to all three, it is always shocking that any of them can be has complicated as they are. There is a reason that we warn so heavily against companies writing in house code using any of these, even when it isn't strictly locking them into the tech, it effectively does so. Add to this the tendency to disastrously choose MS SQL Server as a datastore and the problems just skyrocket.
If they have a mashup of Windows, IIS, and .NET ... I'm guessing there is no easy way to do this. At least not in the sense of simply copying folders out to a VPS instance...
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@bbigford said in IIS on prem to hosted migration:
@scottalanmiller said in IIS on prem to hosted migration:
@bbigford said in IIS on prem to hosted migration:
@scottalanmiller said in IIS on prem to hosted migration:
The cost of hosted Windows is extremely high compared to anything else. Generally around double, just for apples to apples, and often quadruple once you account for the additional resources often needed to accommodate Windows systems. In some cases, the licensing cost of Windows alone can exceed the cost of the VPS hosting.
I've been doing some web searching and have found very few helpful things about the migration. Just lots of migration tools for convenience, but nothing that is manual so I can actually understand what is needed should I not have a convenient tool. More importantly, to fully understand how the process works.
Welcome to Windows, IIS and .NET. All three are hard and complicated for reasons no one knows. Having worked with many alternatives to all three, it is always shocking that any of them can be has complicated as they are. There is a reason that we warn so heavily against companies writing in house code using any of these, even when it isn't strictly locking them into the tech, it effectively does so. Add to this the tendency to disastrously choose MS SQL Server as a datastore and the problems just skyrocket.
I've wondered why some companies choose to limit themselves right off the bat.
It's the developers. They want to hire the cheapest people that they can find, so they hire someone with no skills, no knowledge, and zero concern about how their stuff destroys the company. The cheapest developers are college kids who went through the "vendor training" that Microsoft pays for at school after school and teaches only MS tools and MS products. They use marketing to convince people that these systems are easy to use and allow them to develop easily and rapidly. So you have an entire marketplace full of the lowest end, most useless developers, who exclusively know MS tools and each tool encourages them to lock in further and further into the ecosystem raising the stakes more and more.
The combination is the worst thing ever: code written by someone who is beyond incompetent within the dev realm, with zero oversight or thought from the infrastructure or operations realm. Once the code has been written, then the real costs hit, but never quite enough at once to make people realize that rewriting it from the ground up would save money really quickly. The sunk cost fallacy hits from day one, and emotions drive everything.
It's an ingenious system to allow companies trying to be cheap, and who think that technical people should be a dime a dozen, to get screwed and keep getting screwed for years and years.
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@bbigford said in IIS on prem to hosted migration:
I thought maybe the limiting was just due to hiring developers that have only dealt with MS products, but that doesn't seem logical, because the company should hire people who either want to learn open sourced products, or people who already know them.
Think about any job you've ever looked at, think about how they hire.
They say things like "Hiring a Windows Admin, need five years experience on Windows 2012 or later."
We, as IT people, know that this is ridiculous. Any competent system admin, even one that has never seen Windows before in their lives, can adapt to the technology over a weekend. There is zero reason to demand the exact skills like this, it eliminates many of the best people.
But this is how businesses often think. They random choose a technology, and then demand to hire people versed in that technology. But they never bother to hire anyone, ever, that actually knows enough to think about what technologies would even make sense. So instead of hiring "developer with enough experience to help us choose the right tech and design the product" they want to hire "VB.NET developer who has worked with Visual Studio 2012", because they think that the knowledge is all in knowing the IDE, rather than in knowing how to engineer good software.
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@bbigford said in IIS on prem to hosted migration:
@scottalanmiller said in IIS on prem to hosted migration:
@bbigford said in IIS on prem to hosted migration:
@scottalanmiller said in IIS on prem to hosted migration:
The cost of hosted Windows is extremely high compared to anything else. Generally around double, just for apples to apples, and often quadruple once you account for the additional resources often needed to accommodate Windows systems. In some cases, the licensing cost of Windows alone can exceed the cost of the VPS hosting.
I've been doing some web searching and have found very few helpful things about the migration. Just lots of migration tools for convenience, but nothing that is manual so I can actually understand what is needed should I not have a convenient tool. More importantly, to fully understand how the process works.
Welcome to Windows, IIS and .NET. All three are hard and complicated for reasons no one knows. Having worked with many alternatives to all three, it is always shocking that any of them can be has complicated as they are. There is a reason that we warn so heavily against companies writing in house code using any of these, even when it isn't strictly locking them into the tech, it effectively does so. Add to this the tendency to disastrously choose MS SQL Server as a datastore and the problems just skyrocket.
If they have a mashup of Windows, IIS, and .NET ... I'm guessing there is no easy way to do this. At least not in the sense of simply copying folders out to a VPS instance...
It's not that easy even if you are sticking to Windows. "Not easy" is part of the design. But figuring out how to deploy this is critical regardless of your end needs here. If this system gets old and can't be supported, what's the support game plan if no one knows how to support this software?
Also, we should ask... why is a business relying on software that they can't support? What happens if the code breaks or something?
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@scottalanmiller said in IIS on prem to hosted migration:
@bbigford said in IIS on prem to hosted migration:
@scottalanmiller said in IIS on prem to hosted migration:
@bbigford said in IIS on prem to hosted migration:
@scottalanmiller said in IIS on prem to hosted migration:
The cost of hosted Windows is extremely high compared to anything else. Generally around double, just for apples to apples, and often quadruple once you account for the additional resources often needed to accommodate Windows systems. In some cases, the licensing cost of Windows alone can exceed the cost of the VPS hosting.
I've been doing some web searching and have found very few helpful things about the migration. Just lots of migration tools for convenience, but nothing that is manual so I can actually understand what is needed should I not have a convenient tool. More importantly, to fully understand how the process works.
Welcome to Windows, IIS and .NET. All three are hard and complicated for reasons no one knows. Having worked with many alternatives to all three, it is always shocking that any of them can be has complicated as they are. There is a reason that we warn so heavily against companies writing in house code using any of these, even when it isn't strictly locking them into the tech, it effectively does so. Add to this the tendency to disastrously choose MS SQL Server as a datastore and the problems just skyrocket.
I've wondered why some companies choose to limit themselves right off the bat.
The sunk cost fallacy hits from day one, and emotions drive everything.
That's scary to think about.
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We had this happen recently. Company wanted to hire Java people. Java was the one development name that the owners of the company knew. They couldn't identify Java if their lives depended on it, they couldn't write it, they weren't sure what it did, but they knew the name and knew that that was what they had to have. To make matters worse, the owners had Comp Sci degrees, so were extremely prideful about their technical expertise, even though they could not read code (yes, universities give out CS degrees to people who aren't even clear what programming is.)
So they just hired random, cheap "Java people". Of course, no part of the project needed any Java at all, it made no sense. Likewise they hired "Oracle people" to handle the data aspects, even though no data support was needed and no relational data existed. They knew names, they hired based on those names, nothing more.
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@bbigford said in IIS on prem to hosted migration:
@scottalanmiller said in IIS on prem to hosted migration:
@bbigford said in IIS on prem to hosted migration:
@scottalanmiller said in IIS on prem to hosted migration:
@bbigford said in IIS on prem to hosted migration:
@scottalanmiller said in IIS on prem to hosted migration:
The cost of hosted Windows is extremely high compared to anything else. Generally around double, just for apples to apples, and often quadruple once you account for the additional resources often needed to accommodate Windows systems. In some cases, the licensing cost of Windows alone can exceed the cost of the VPS hosting.
I've been doing some web searching and have found very few helpful things about the migration. Just lots of migration tools for convenience, but nothing that is manual so I can actually understand what is needed should I not have a convenient tool. More importantly, to fully understand how the process works.
Welcome to Windows, IIS and .NET. All three are hard and complicated for reasons no one knows. Having worked with many alternatives to all three, it is always shocking that any of them can be has complicated as they are. There is a reason that we warn so heavily against companies writing in house code using any of these, even when it isn't strictly locking them into the tech, it effectively does so. Add to this the tendency to disastrously choose MS SQL Server as a datastore and the problems just skyrocket.
I've wondered why some companies choose to limit themselves right off the bat.
The sunk cost fallacy hits from day one, and emotions drive everything.
That's scary to think about.
This is the 98% case for the SMB market. Nearly all businesses fall prey to this emotional problem.
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@scottalanmiller said in IIS on prem to hosted migration:
@bbigford said in IIS on prem to hosted migration:
@scottalanmiller said in IIS on prem to hosted migration:
@bbigford said in IIS on prem to hosted migration:
@scottalanmiller said in IIS on prem to hosted migration:
The cost of hosted Windows is extremely high compared to anything else. Generally around double, just for apples to apples, and often quadruple once you account for the additional resources often needed to accommodate Windows systems. In some cases, the licensing cost of Windows alone can exceed the cost of the VPS hosting.
I've been doing some web searching and have found very few helpful things about the migration. Just lots of migration tools for convenience, but nothing that is manual so I can actually understand what is needed should I not have a convenient tool. More importantly, to fully understand how the process works.
Welcome to Windows, IIS and .NET. All three are hard and complicated for reasons no one knows. Having worked with many alternatives to all three, it is always shocking that any of them can be has complicated as they are. There is a reason that we warn so heavily against companies writing in house code using any of these, even when it isn't strictly locking them into the tech, it effectively does so. Add to this the tendency to disastrously choose MS SQL Server as a datastore and the problems just skyrocket.
If they have a mashup of Windows, IIS, and .NET ... I'm guessing there is no easy way to do this. At least not in the sense of simply copying folders out to a VPS instance...
It's not that easy even if you are sticking to Windows. "Not easy" is part of the design. But figuring out how to deploy this is critical regardless of your end needs here. If this system gets old and can't be supported, what's the support game plan if no one knows how to support this software?
Also, we should ask... why is a business relying on software that they can't support? What happens if the code breaks or something?
If they are indeed using a mashup of Windows, IIS, .NET, and MS SQL, the only answer I have is vendor support. If that is not there, the knee jerk reaction is 'not good'.
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@scottalanmiller said in IIS on prem to hosted migration:
We had this happen recently. Company wanted to hire Java people. Java was the one development name that the owners of the company knew. They couldn't identify Java if their lives depended on it, they couldn't write it, they weren't sure what it did, but they knew the name and knew that that was what they had to have. To make matters worse, the owners had Comp Sci degrees, so were extremely prideful about their technical expertise, even though they could not read code (yes, universities give out CS degrees to people who aren't even clear what programming is.)
So they just hired random, cheap "Java people". Of course, no part of the project needed any Java at all, it made no sense. Likewise they hired "Oracle people" to handle the data aspects, even though no data support was needed and no relational data existed. They knew names, they hired based on those names, nothing more.
Yikes... that is more emotional than I've worked with. You can have all the crazies.
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@bbigford said in IIS on prem to hosted migration:
Re: How would you move an IIS workload from on site to a VPS
I'd honestly have to gather more info before I say one way or another. Slowing down and thinking about it, I believe this app only exists in inetput and is asp.net... I'd have to jump into their server and take a look.
Is it by any chance .NET Core? Runs great as Docker on Linux, for example.
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@thwr said in IIS on prem to hosted migration:
@bbigford said in IIS on prem to hosted migration:
Re: How would you move an IIS workload from on site to a VPS
I'd honestly have to gather more info before I say one way or another. Slowing down and thinking about it, I believe this app only exists in inetput and is asp.net... I'd have to jump into their server and take a look.
Is it by any chance .NET Core? Runs great as Docker on Linux, for example.
I'm not sure off the top of my head to be honest. I would guess no, just based on some characteristics of the client. But I will be gathering more details.
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@bbigford said in IIS on prem to hosted migration:
@thwr said in IIS on prem to hosted migration:
@bbigford said in IIS on prem to hosted migration:
Re: How would you move an IIS workload from on site to a VPS
I'd honestly have to gather more info before I say one way or another. Slowing down and thinking about it, I believe this app only exists in inetput and is asp.net... I'd have to jump into their server and take a look.
Is it by any chance .NET Core? Runs great as Docker on Linux, for example.
I'm not sure off the top of my head to be honest. I would guess no, just based on some characteristics of the client. But I will be gathering more details.
Damn. How old is the application? .NET Core is relatively new (approx. 2 years or so)
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@thwr said in IIS on prem to hosted migration:
@bbigford said in IIS on prem to hosted migration:
@thwr said in IIS on prem to hosted migration:
@bbigford said in IIS on prem to hosted migration:
Re: How would you move an IIS workload from on site to a VPS
I'd honestly have to gather more info before I say one way or another. Slowing down and thinking about it, I believe this app only exists in inetput and is asp.net... I'd have to jump into their server and take a look.
Is it by any chance .NET Core? Runs great as Docker on Linux, for example.
I'm not sure off the top of my head to be honest. I would guess no, just based on some characteristics of the client. But I will be gathering more details.
Damn. How old is the application? .NET Core is relatively new (approx. 2 years or so)
Ah, I didn't know it was a newer version. I thought it was just different. Know that I do not know a lot about .NET/ASP.NET/.NET Core. I haven't had a need to support many web services, so learning the exact underlying differences is something I have on my continuing list of things to master.
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@bbigford said in IIS on prem to hosted migration:
@scottalanmiller said in IIS on prem to hosted migration:
@bbigford said in IIS on prem to hosted migration:
@scottalanmiller said in IIS on prem to hosted migration:
@bbigford said in IIS on prem to hosted migration:
@scottalanmiller said in IIS on prem to hosted migration:
The cost of hosted Windows is extremely high compared to anything else. Generally around double, just for apples to apples, and often quadruple once you account for the additional resources often needed to accommodate Windows systems. In some cases, the licensing cost of Windows alone can exceed the cost of the VPS hosting.
I've been doing some web searching and have found very few helpful things about the migration. Just lots of migration tools for convenience, but nothing that is manual so I can actually understand what is needed should I not have a convenient tool. More importantly, to fully understand how the process works.
Welcome to Windows, IIS and .NET. All three are hard and complicated for reasons no one knows. Having worked with many alternatives to all three, it is always shocking that any of them can be has complicated as they are. There is a reason that we warn so heavily against companies writing in house code using any of these, even when it isn't strictly locking them into the tech, it effectively does so. Add to this the tendency to disastrously choose MS SQL Server as a datastore and the problems just skyrocket.
If they have a mashup of Windows, IIS, and .NET ... I'm guessing there is no easy way to do this. At least not in the sense of simply copying folders out to a VPS instance...
It's not that easy even if you are sticking to Windows. "Not easy" is part of the design. But figuring out how to deploy this is critical regardless of your end needs here. If this system gets old and can't be supported, what's the support game plan if no one knows how to support this software?
Also, we should ask... why is a business relying on software that they can't support? What happens if the code breaks or something?
If they are indeed using a mashup of Windows, IIS, .NET, and MS SQL, the only answer I have is vendor support. If that is not there, the knee jerk reaction is 'not good'.
If there is a vendor, they should be able to help you with the migration.
