Reporting Services 2008 and IIS

One of the requirements for SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) in the 2000 and 2005 releases was that Microsoft's Internet Information Services (IIS) should be installed on the system as the Web Services product for running the Report Manager and Report Server applications.

I was assuming that will be the case on SQL Server Reporting Services 2008 ,but I figured out that nothing installed on the IIS !!

I thought that someting was wrong ,but after a while I start googling to find out the reason because everything was working well and nothing on IIS !!

YES..
It was a surprise for that when I found that SQL Server Reporting Services 2008 are not more dependent on IIS.

SQL Server 2008 no longer depends on IIS (Andrew Fryer) to make it easier to configure and to reduce the attack surface of the report server.

Config simplification is one of the reasons for the move to not use IIS, but the other is around memory, thread and scale management, if you have every tried to generate a 100 page PDF report you will know what I mean (Evan Garden).

Now in SQL Server Reporting Services 2008, we do not need IIS at all. The Report Manager and Report Server applications can be supported using the HTTP listener (http.sys) that is already part of Windows 2003 Server and above. This is a much more secure architecture. I tested this out on my upgraded test server. I was able to stop my existing IIS service and still run my existing reports successfully(Reporting Services 2008 is IIS Agnostic By Brian Egler).