http.sys is a giant fucking turd. That and the whole urlacl thing. Nothing but pain. They added it because of shitty performance in the NT kernel when serving HTTP from userspace and it turned into a friction point for the whole operating system.
This seems to be one of the patterns for large enterprise software companies, IBM did it as well.
It would be interesting to see what Microsoft could do with Linux on the desktop if they swung their weight behind it, Microsoft has incredible engineering resources and some amazing programmers, I doubt it would happen but it would be fascinating.
It seems they have big plans for their cloud product "Azure"
Strangely that document makes me want NT 3.51 back again as well :)
Exchange Onsite deployments aren't dead, on-site email is dead. Unless, you're "too big" for the cloud (>20k users) because of <$Requirement> then Exchange is an option.
Keeping data On-Premise has always been a challenge, SAN are expensive but that's what it takes if you want data locally.
I can't comment on the rest but we're comparing Apples to Oranges here.
Doesn't really sound you know what you're talking about. That technology is dead and doesn't really replace BizTalk.
"In April 2015 Microsoft announced that it will end support for AppFabric for Windows Server on the 2nd April 2016."
People are stuck with it now, deprecation or not.
Currently it's a complete bastard of an operating system. It's expensive, hard to manage even with powershell and DSC etc, difficult to update, difficult to provision, complicated and to be honest absolutely terrible licensing hell that costs us days a year. Hyper-V just adds complexity before anyone suggests that.
Exchange on-site deployments are dead. Everyone is moving away from them now and into Office 365 and Google Apps. There is no rational cost justification to use anything else now. Even the big orgs (5000+ staff) are moving off it as it's cheaper to get a fat pipe in than it is to keep 2-3 windows admins and a pile of kit and a SAN on the payroll just to run groupware.
Biztalk is also dead and has been for a few years. People who were using it heavily seem to be holding onto it due to cost reasons and everyone else who has been using it and have done any platform re-engineering have moved off to Windows Server AppFabric, NServiceBus and custom integrations or to AWS/SQS.
Microsoft are pushing Windows Server 2016 with container support as the up and coming new thing. I'm really not interested in this myself. I don't think anyone else is either other than a select number of core windows bloggers. It's simply a "me too" move.
As we re-engineer our application, what our endgame currently looks like is deploying disposable Linux VMs (CentOS) on AWS running ASP.Net 5/golang, microservices, lots of small PostgreSQL nodes (RDS) rather than massive 48 core SQL Server boxes, using OAuth2/OpenID authentication and getting rid of our extensive operations team who are incidentally more of an obstruction than an aid to the organisation.
IMHO Windows Server is probably circling the drain. There are very few places it fits in a modern business and this is only going to get worse going forth as well.
The remaining killer is Active Directory but you can already get Microsoft to deal with that for you on Azure, pre-integrated with Office 365 and sharepoint etc.
Microsoft I suspect will end up a services company like Google with some hardware being sold on the side. And you know what? That's fine.