Kentico 8.1: Removing support for medium trust environment
Kentico 8.1 is the upcoming version after our big release of Kentico 8 in March. It’s scheduled for Q3 this year and we decided to drop support for the medium trust environment. This blog post contains information that explains the reasoning behind this.
Medium trust has been with us for a while and we believe that it’s time to let it go. The trigger for us was
this Microsoft KB article published in 2012. It basically says that medium trust doesn’t guarantee application isolation. Instead, Microsoft now recommends to put websites into separate application pools (details in the article). You can also see that many new parts of ASP.NET run only in full trust environments. Some great examples of this are MVC, WebAPI, Entity Framework or SignalR. It is pretty clear that Microsoft decided to kill medium trust.
Of course, we still have an existing customer base and we have supported medium trust for several years, so before we made the decision we did the following research:
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We contacted many partners (directly, through e-mail, through surveys, etc.) and asked them whether or not, and how much they use medium trust in their environments. The result is that most of our partners are using only full trust or give people the ability to choose. Only a small percentage of partners requires medium trust, and if so, it’s only for legacy systems or very cheap hosting options.
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From our discussions with partners we also know that most of Kentico installations are running on standalone servers, so in many cases there is no need for websites isolation anyway.
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We researched the largest hosting companies such as GoDaddy.com or SmarterASP.net. We found that they all support full trust environments.
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We also know that cloud providers such as Amazon, Windows Azure or Rackspace don’t require medium trust either.
Based on all these facts, we decided to drop Medium trust support in Kentico 8.1.
If you are using medium trust right now and it is your only option, please fill out this form (I will get back to you and discuss your situation as soon as possible):