The Microsoft Stack: Trying to Bring Order to Chaos

By Patrick Hynds

August 15, 2008 —  (Page 1 of 3)
If you are, or have ever been, in charge of a large data center supporting Web applications, then you most likely have seen the delicate balance between everything working and nothing working.

IT seems to be fraught with horror stories, but it seems that the Web farm and Web data center ones are particularly gruesome. This is because nowhere in the enterprise are so many rival factions of technology brought together than in a Web servicing data center.

There are some cases where this is not that bad, especially when there is some homogeneity. The worst cases are when there are dozens of servers, each hosting individual production sites and each with their own groups of developers, Webmasters and database administrators putting in their own “best practices.” For this reason, I would never take a job running a data center for a Web-hosting company.

The only exception that might make me rethink that stance is good tooling such as the Windows-based Hosting version 4.5 that Microsoft has pulled together. It isn’t a specific product, but several products, technologies, scripts and utilities documented like a resource kit in the style of what we had back in the early Windows NT days.

If you have ever read an IBM Redbook or used the Patterns and Practices documentation from Microsoft, then you already have seen something like this offering. The latter reads like a blueprint to creating the IT plan for a company that does windows hosting, and even offers several scenarios including Discount Dedicated Hosting, Managed Dedicated Hosting, Shared Web Hosting (the scariest) and Application Hosting. Of these, Application Hosting is the most interesting if you are not working for a company in the business of hosting sites for customers.

I was pleasantly surprised by how deep the documentation goes. It literally is a guide to running the back end of a Web hosting business, and it includes processes, staffing and even automation tasks such as automatic provisioning, similar to what you see if you have ever set up a dedicated hosted server from one of the many ISPs that provide this service. I use SRAWeb.net for a couple of dedicated servers I use, and I wondered about the back end when I clicked on that provision button on their interface.

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