Welcome to the first quarterly platform update of 2024.  If you’re new to these updates, welcome!  This update aims to share recent changes as well as our best current knowledge on upcoming changes, but predicting the future is tricky business and this shouldn’t be considered a committed roadmap. 

With that said, on to the update…

InterSystems IRIS Production Operating Systems and CPU Architectures

Minimum Supported CPU Models

As a reminder, we announced that InterSystems IRIS will start to have minimum required CPU functionality for Intel/AMD-based systems starting with IRIS 2024.1 and annually thereafter.  This allows IRIS to rely on certain CPU instruction extensions, such as AVX & BMI, that will result in significantly better performance of certain operations.  For more information, please see my InterSystems IRIS Minimum Supported CPU Models developer community post.

 

Red Hat Enterprise Linux

• Recent Changes
  • Minor OS Certification has been completed for RHEL 9.3 & 8.9 on IRIS 2023.1. “Minor OS version certification” is a process that is intended to provide additional security that a minor OS update didn’t break anything obvious.
• Upcoming Changes
  • The next major update for RHEL will be RHEL 10 which is expected in Q2 of 2025.
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 will reach end-of-maintenance on June 30, 2024.  If you’re still on RHEL 7, now’s the time to upgrade.
  • RHEL 9.4 & RHEL 8.10 are scheduled to be released in May.  InterSystems will perform Minor OS Certification for these platforms shortly thereafter.
• Further reading: RHEL Release Page

 

Ubuntu

• Upcoming Changes
  • The next major update of Ubuntu is 24.04 is on-schedule for April, 2024.  We’re aiming to add support for Ubuntu 24.04 to IRIS 2024.1 within a few weeks of Ubuntu’s 24.04’s release.
  • Ubuntu 22.04.3 is currently undergoing Minor OS certification and we expect to give it a thumb’s up/down by the next quarterly update.
• Previous Updates
  • Ubuntu released 22.04.2 LTS & 20.04.6 LTS in February and March, respectively.  InterSystems has completed performing additional testing of IRIS on 22.04.02 LTS through Minor OS version certification.
• Further Reading: Ubuntu Releases Page

 

SUSE Linux

• Recent Changes
  • Minor OS certification has been completed for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15 SP5 without problems.  SP5 includes Linux Kernel 5.14.21, OpenSSL 3.0.8, and Python 3.11.
• Upcoming Changes
  • SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15 SP6 is scheduled for late Q2 or early Q3.  Details of what’s included are still emerging.
• Previous Updates
  • General Support from SUSE for Linux Enterprise Server 15 SP3 came to an end on 12/31/2022, but extended security support will continue until December, 2025.

Further Reading: SUSE lifecycle

 

Oracle Linux

• Recent Changes
  • Oracle Linux 9.2 has completed Minor OS certification without incident.
• Further Reading: Oracle Linux Support Policy

 

Microsoft Windows

• Upcoming Changes
  • Windows Server 2025 is expected to be released in Q4.  We’re keeping an eye on it and formulating plans for support.
  • Windows 12 is expected even earlier with a possible GA date as early as June.  We’ll start the process of supporting the new OS after it’s been released.
• Further Reading: Microsoft Lifecycle

 

AIX

• Upcoming Changes
  • Minor OS Certification has been completed for AIX 7.2 TL5-06 on IRIS 2023.3.
  •  
• Previous Updates
  • IRIS 2023.3 adds support for OpenSSL 3.0 for both AIX 7.2 & 7.3.  OpenSSL 3.0 is a significant improvement in overall security when compared with OpenSSL 1.0.
  • Minor OS Certification has been completed for AIX 7.2 TL5-04 and TL5-05 on IRIS 2023.1.
• Further Reading: AIX Lifecycle

 

Containers

• Recent Changes
  • We have started regular updates of IRIS containers with patches to the base container image and third-party dependencies.  IRIS containers that follow the new tagging scheme now have at least every-other-week updates.
• Upcoming Changes
  • An early warning that we are planning to change the base container image from Ubuntu 22.04 to Ubuntu 24.04 with IRIS 2024.2
  • We’re considering changes to the default IRIS container to, by default, have internal traffic (ECP, Mirroring, etc) on a different port from potentially externally facing traffic (ODBC, JDBC, etc).  If you have particular needs in this area, please reach out and let me know.
• Previous Updates
  • From IRIS 2023.2 onward, IRIS containers will only be tagged with the year and release, such as “2023.2” instead of the full build numbers we’ve been using in the past.  This way, your application can, by default, pick up the latest maintenance build of your release.
  • We’ve also added “latest-em” and “latest-cd” tags for the most recent extended maintenance and continuous distribution IRIS release.  These are good for demos, examples, and development environments.
  • We have started to tag the preview containers with “-preview” so that it’s clear which container is the most recent GA release versus a preview of an upcoming release.

 

InterSystems IRIS Development Operating Systems and CPU Architectures

MacOS

• Upcoming Changes
  • Apple has released MacOS 14 with IRIS support in IRIS 2024.1

 

InterSystems Components

• InterSystems Kubernetes Operator (IKO) 3.7 has been released.
• InterSystems API Manager (IAM) 3.4 has also been released.

 

Caché & Ensemble Production Operating Systems and CPU Architectures

• Recent Changes
  • Cache 2018.1.9 was released on February 14. 
  • There are only 3 more maintenance releases of Caché & Ensemble planned.  See  Jeff’s excellent community article for more info.

InterSystems Supported Platforms Documentation

The InterSystems Supported Platforms documentation is the definitive source information on supported technologies.

• IRIS 2023.1 Supported Server Platforms
• IRIS 2022.1 Supported Server Platforms
• IRIS 2021.1 Supported Server Platforms
• Caché & Ensemble 2018.1 Supported Server Platforms

 

… and that’s all folks.  Again, if there’s something more that you’d like to know about, please let us know.