What is Kestrel (vs IIS / Express)

Question

What is the kestrel web server and how does it relate to IIS / IIS Express?

I come from developing apps on IIS Express and hosting them on an IIS web server. With ASP.NET Core I have a dependency on Microsoft.AspNetCore.Server.Kestrel and my startup has .UseServer("Microsoft.AspNetCore.Server.Kestrel"). But when I run my website, I still get the IIS Express icon in the system tray. Someone asked me if I was using IIS Express or Kestrel and I didn't know what to say!

I don't have any cross-platform requirements as I develop on a PC and host in Azure, so I'm confused if I even need Kestrel, but it doesn't seem like there's an alternative - even the simplest samples use Kestrel.

Answer 1

I'd like to offer an alternative answer, with some history, so that you might understand why Kestrel comes, even if you only use Windows and IIS.

At the very beginning of ASP.NET development before year 2000, clearly Microsoft created two pieces to host ASP.NET WebForms apps,

• Cassini, later became ASP.NET Development Server in Visual Studio. It is a fully managed web server written in C# based on HttpListener. Of course, since it was for development only, many features were never implemented. As Microsoft made the source code of Cassini available for the public, there are third parties who forked the code base and added more features, which started the Cassini family.
• ASP.NET support on IIS (revision 1). Because IIS was 4.0 and 5.0/5.1 at that time, which has nothing like application pools, ASP.NET even has its own worker process (aspnet_wp.exe).

So to develop a web app, you use Cassini, and to deploy you use IIS.

• The introduction of application pools in IIS 6 required some changes on ASP.NET side, so aspnet_wp.exe became obsolete and replaced by aspnet_isapi.dll. That can be seen as ASP.NET support on IIS revision 2. So ASP.NET apps are being hosted in IIS worker processes w3wp.exe.

• The introduction of integrated pipeline in IIS 7 and above required further changes, which replaced aspnet_isapi.dll with webengine4.dll. That can be seen as ASP.NET support on IIS revision 3. ASP.NET and IIS pipelines are unified.

You can see ASP.NET has become much more complex and tightly integrated with IIS, so Cassini started to show its age, and gradually was replaced by IIS Express (a user mode lite IIS).

Thus, in many cases, when people blame that IIS is slow, they should blame ASP.NET in fact. IIS itself without ASP.NET is pretty fast and stable, while ASP.NET was not developed with enough performance metrics in mind (as WebForms focuses quite a lot of productivities and RAD).

Then in November 2014, ASP.NET 5 (later renamed to ASP.NET Core) was announced and became a cross platform technology. Obviously Microsoft needed a new design to support Windows, macOS, and Linux, where all major web servers, nginx/Apache (or other web servers) should be considered besides IIS.

I think many would agree that Microsoft learned quite a lot from NodeJS, and then designed and developed Kestrel (based on libuv initially but might move to other technology soon). It is a light-weight web server like Cassini initially, but later more features are being added (like another answer commented, much more features so can be treated as a full web server). Though fully managed (some native dependencies exist), it is no longer a toy web server like Cassini.

Then why cannot you just use Kestrel? Why IIS Express and potentially IIS, nginx, or Apache are still needed? That primarily is a result of today's internet practice. Most web sites use reverse proxies to take requests from your web browsers and then forward to the application servers in the background.

• IIS Express/IIS/nginx/Apache are the reverse proxy servers
• Kestrel/NodeJS/Tomcat and so on are the application servers

Another answer already showed a link to Microsoft documentation, so you can take a look.

Microsoft developed HttpPlatformHandler initially to make IIS a good enough reverse proxy for Java/Python and so on, so planned to use it for ASP.NET Core. Issues started to appear during development, so later Microsoft made ASP.NET Core Module specifically for ASP.NET Core. That's ASP.NET support on IIS revision 4.

Starting from ASP.NET Core 2.2, ASP.NET Core Module for IIS (version 2) can host .NET Core environment inside IIS worker process (w3wp.exe), quite similar to ASP.NET 2.x/4.x. This mode is called "IIS in-process hosting". It can be considered as ASP.NET support on IIS revision 5.

Well, quite lengthy, but I hope I put all necessary pieces together and you enjoy reading it.