Healthshare/Ensemble/Cache deployment tool? Anyone every created one?

Question

Question

Scott Beeson · Feb 4, 2016

#Caché #Deployment #Ensemble #System Administration

I'm working on a proposal for a deployment tool development project and I was wondering if anyone had any experience with such a thing.

We use Healthshare and implementations for new clients are tedius and lengthy. Lots of ensemble service, registry value, lookup tables, namespaces and other things have to be created and configured.

I would like to create a Zen or CSP page based deployment tool that can do all this with a few parameters and some custom code.

Has anyone done this? What are some pitfalls you ran into? Any unique ideas you included? Other general thoughts?

Discussion (15)3

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Timothy Leavitt · Feb 4, 2016

At a Caché level (for namespaces, databases, code, and security), %Installer may be useful; see: http://docs.intersystems.com/cache20152/csp/docbook/DocBook.UI.Page.cls?KEY=GCI_manifest

For Ensemble, there are some additional deployment-related features that might do more for you in terms of settings and lookup tables. See: http://docs.intersystems.com/ens20152/csp/docbook/DocBook.UI.Page.cls?KEY=EGDV_deploying#EGDV_deployment_overview

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score 0 · Answer 1 · 2016-02-04T11:54:43-05:00

Scott - have you looked at %Installer? That should be the first place that you start for trying to create a deployment from scratch. This is how Ensemble, HealthShare and TrakCare instances get initialized by the installer and I know a lot of customers have used this with great success.

Also, the Enterprise Manager which is coming out in 2016.2 may be of interest in this area as well.

score 0 · Answer 2 · 2016-02-04T12:50:18-05:00

Scott Beeson · Feb 4, 2016

Enterprise Manager sounds very interesting... is there any documentation available yet?

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score 0 · Answer 3 · 2016-02-04T12:57:18-05:00

Ben Spead · Feb 4, 2016

See https://community.intersystems.com/post/enterprise-manager-20162 and the attachment

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score 0 · Answer 4 · 2016-02-04T13:34:10-05:00

Scott Beeson · Feb 4, 2016

Thanks, just sent that PDF to my Kindle.

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score 0 · Answer 5 · 2016-02-04T12:49:16-05:00

Great resources, thanks! Do you think it's possible/feasible to create a web-based frontend for these two things that would simply take in a few parameters (Customer name, checkboxes, etc) and launch %Installer() with the parameters and deploy the production XML with necessary parameters?

score 0 · Answer 6 · 2016-02-04T12:58:08-05:00

I believe you can take paramaters for %Installer from a config file so you could make a page which creates the config file with the customer name, etc.

score 0 · Answer 7 · 2016-02-04T13:34:40-05:00

Scott Beeson · Feb 4, 2016

Thanks

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score 0 · Answer 8 · 2016-02-04T19:53:21-05:00

Hi, Scott!

Look also at this approach for deployment. This UML Explorer tool is deployed by importing class package into Studio (not Atelier).

During class compilation it runs installation scripts which create database, namespace, web app, etc.

So for the client installation procedure is just one action: import package into Caché with Studio or Control Panel and client can start use it. They like it.

score 0 · Answer 9 · 2016-02-05T09:28:18-05:00

Scott Beeson · Feb 5, 2016

Thanks, I'll take a look!

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score 0 · Answer 10 · 2016-02-05T05:44:21-05:00

Scott:

it depends what you mean by a deployment tool. It opens up a whole new world of automation so you'll have to start to think about versioning your artifacts etc. It depends how you want to embrace your whole provisioning and deployment and management process.

My suggestion for infrastructure provisioning & deployment: Terraform; for management Ansible: agentless and easy to learn and use.

Of course, Puppet & Chef are strong valid alternatives but you'll have to take on board other considerations...

This subject cannot be done with one post and it really depends on how much automation you want to bring to this process. I would even suggest you consider containers.

Once automation is seriously considered there is no turning back :-)

All the best

score 0 · Answer 11 · 2016-02-05T09:27:37-05:00

I'm familiar with Ansible, Puppet and Chef, but I think these are outside my scope. Our solution is hosted by ISC, so they would take care of any physical/virtual hardware (my assumption). My concern is 99% Healthshare, Ensemble and Cache related.

score 0 · Answer 12 · 2016-03-01T17:23:15-05:00

Evgeny Shvarov · Mar 1, 2016

Here is new article about approach of uitlizing Ansible for deployment Caché Apps.

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score 0 · Answer 13 · 2016-02-19T12:31:20-05:00

Evgeny Shvarov · Feb 19, 2016

Hi, Scott!

Please see the article about deployment.

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score 0 · Answer 14 · 2016-03-01T19:47:32-05:00

Murray Oldfield · Mar 1, 2016

Also the Ansible series. Here...

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