IIS 8 gets released along with Windows Server 2012. This comes with several interesting features such as NUMA-support, WebSockets, security improvements and better web deployment tools.

An interesting improvement in IIS 8 is NUMA-aware multi-core scalability -

To take advantage of this multi-core processors, IIS can be setup to work in two different modes depending on your expected workload – run multiple worker processes in one application pool (ideally one worker for each NUMA node) or run multiple application pools in a single workload/site. There are other configurations as well which deal with responsibility for node optimization and soft or hard thread affinity. You can read more about NUMA-aware scalability in IIS and how Windows Server 2012 works with NUMA hardware in an eBook called “Introducing Windows Server 2012” (as well as some of the below features in detail).

IIS 8 also features

- Web Sockets support for ASP.NET – .NET developers can leverage System.Web.WebSockets introduced in .NET 4.5
- Throttling improvements for multi-tenant environments
- Improvements in the way SSL is handled.

There are also some other security enhancements such as

- Dynamic IP restrictions, which can not only deny connection to IPs that break certain rules, but can also be set to return a 401, 403, 404 or just terminate connection altogether without a response
- Ability to enable FTP logon restrictions (by number of tries)

  The IIS team also announced Web Deploy 3.0 RTW which supports deployment to IIS 8 and comes with several features to make deployments easier for system administrators. Some of these are -

- dbDacFx Provider for Incremental Database publishing – with support for SQL Server and SQL Azure
- Ability to take an Application Offline before Deploy
- Parameterization improvements – such as ability to add/delete/replace xml elements,
- Automatic Backups
- Ability to change Authentication mode for the site
- Several PowerShell cmdlets

You can read an introduction to Web Deploy for more information about the tool.