There is still plenty of Window Server using enterprises churning out .Net Framework code that must run on IIS. It's shrinking market for sure but it's still a market.

If they are willing to spend money on Windows Server, 3k a year to make it not less painful is probably worth it. Remember, any company using Windows Server is not hiring skilled DevOps/SRE/Ops, it's probably average at best, low paid workers. It's the type of people who have probably never heard of HackerNews either so it makes advertising here an interesting choice.

we still use windows server and IIS, and I can assure you we're never spending 3k to make anything less painful. our middle name is pain. and we bill hourly for that

Same, the per instance price is a non-starter when talking to procurement.

Not painful enough to justify additional tooling in any case.

exactly what I'm saying, 3K per server is pretty damn steep.

Its free and unlimited for corps under 1M ARR.

Like the sibling comment mentioned, there's still lots of .net framework apps that target IIS. I haven't used IIS in about 15 years, but this looks like it provides a similar feature set to what Octopus Deploy had back then (Octopus seems to have changed a lot since then). i.e. more than what VS deployment can do.

No one connects to prod directly from VS in corporate setup. You do it via pipelines.

It is for when you want to have accountability of deployments and at least what we had in Octopus deploy I could promote versions from test/acc to prod based on triggers or manual click of a button.

So you can have build pipelines separate from actual deploy pipelines and manage artefacts built by the build pipeline. It is required in some environments, but totally useless and waste of time in smaller environments.

I understand what you are saying, but with AI now, I don't see writing a pipeline as a hurdle anymore.