Enterprises need to grow and manage their global computing infrastructures rapidly and efficiently while simultaneously optimizing and managing capital costs and expenses. Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) computing and storage services meet the needs of the most demanding Caché based application by providing
 a highly robust global computing infrastructure.

The Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud provides a broad set of infrastructure services, such as compute resources, storage options, and networking that are delivered as a utility: on-demand, available in seconds, with pay-as-you-go pricing. New services can be provisioned quickly, without upfront capital expense. This allows enterprises, start-ups, small and medium-sized businesses, and customers in the public sector to access the building blocks they need to respond quickly to changing business requirements.

Updated: 10-Jan, 2023 

In this article, we’ll build a highly available IRIS configuration using Kubernetes Deployments with distributed persistent storage instead of the “traditional” IRIS mirror pair. This deployment would be able to tolerate infrastructure-related failures, such as node, storage and Availability Zone failures. The described approach greatly reduces the complexity of the deployment at the expense of slightly extended RTO.

If you're running IRIS in a mirrored configuration for HA in AWS, the question of providing a Mirror VIP (Virtual IP) becomes relevant. Virtual IP offers a way for downstream systems to interact with IRIS using one IP address. Even when a failover happens, downstream systems can reconnect to the same IP address and continue working.

Overview

Predictable storage IO performance with low latency is vital to provide scalability and reliability for your applications. This set of benchmarks is to inform users of IRIS considering deploying applications in AWS about EBS gp3 volume performance.

Summary

• An LVM stripe can increase IOPS and throughput beyond single EBS volume performance limits.
• An LVM stripe lowers read latency.

October 17, 2019

Anton Umnikov
Sr. Cloud Solutions Architect at InterSystems
AWS CSAA, GCP CACE

AWS Glue is a fully managed ETL (extract, transform, and load) service that makes it simple and cost-effective to categorize your data, clean it, enrich it, and move it reliably between various data stores.

In the case of InterSystems IRIS, AWS Glue allows moving large amounts of data from both Cloud and on-Prem data sources into IRIS.

 For Global Summit 2016, I set out to showcase a Reference Architecture I had been working on for a National Provider Directory solution with State Level Instances and a National Instance all running HealthShare Provider Directory and all running on AWS Infrastructure.

In short, I wanted to highlight:

• The implementation of Amazon Web Services to provision the infrastructure, including the auto-creation of the state level instances through Cloud Formation.
• The use of the HSPD Broadcast functionality to Notify Upstream Systems Changes in Master Provider Data.
• The implementation of a transformation of the standard Broadcast Object to HL7 MFN for interoperability.
• The principals of Master Data Management applied to the Provider Directory.

InterSystems IRIS Deployment Guide for AWS using CloudFormation template 

Please note: following this guide, especially the prerequisites section requires Intermediate to Advanced level of knowledge of AWS. You'll need to create and manage S3 buckets, IAM roles for EC2 instances, VPCs and Subnets. You'll also need access to InterSystems binaries (usually downloaded via WRC site) as well as IRIS license key.
 

Aug 12, 2020
Anton Umnikov

Templates Source code is available here: https://github.com/antonum/AWSIRISDeployment

Table of Contents

InterSystems IRIS Deployment Guide – AWS Partner Network.

Good News!! You can use now the Free InterSystems IRIS Community Edition in the AWS Cloud

Hello,

It's very common that people new in InterSystems IRIS want to start to work in a personal project in a full free environment. If you are one of this, Good News!! You can use now the Free InterSystems IRIS Community Edition in the AWS Cloud.

It is pretty easy to create a new EC2 instance from InterSystems IRIS Community Edition in AWS

Most transactional applications have a 70:30 RW profile. However, some special cases have extremely high write IO profiles.

I ran storage IO tests in the ap-southeast-2 (Sydney) AWS region to simulate IRIS database IO patterns and throughput similar to a very high write rate application.

The test aimed to determine whether the EC2 instance types and EBS volume types available in the AWS Australian regions will support the high IO rates and throughput required.

Minimal tuning was done in the operating system or IRIS (see Operating System and IRIS configuration below).

Last time we deployed a simple IRIS application to the Google Cloud. Now we’re going to deploy the same project to Amazon Web Services using its Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS).

We assume you’ve already forked the IRIS project to your own private repository. It’s called <username>/my-objectscript-rest-docker-template in this article. <root_repo_dir> is its root directory.

Before getting started, install the AWS command-line interface and, for Kubernetes cluster creation, eksctl, a simple CLI utility. For AWS you can try to use aws2, but you’ll need to set aws2 usage in kube config file as described here.

All source code to the article is available at: https://github.com/antonum/ha-iris-k8s&nbsp;

In the previous article, we discussed how to set up IRIS on k8s cluster with high availability, based on the distributed storage, instead of traditional mirroring. As an example, that article used the Azure AKS cluster. In this one, we'll continue to explore highly available configurations on k8s. This time, based on Amazon EKS (AWS managed Kubernetes service) and would include an option for doing database backup and restore, based on Kubernetes Snapshot.

Installation

Let's get right to business.

Imagine you want to see what InterSystems can give you in terms of data analytics. You studied the theory and now you want some practice. Fortunately, InterSystems provides a project that contains some good examples: Samples BI. Start with the README file, skipping anything associated with Docker, and go straight to the step-by-step installation. Launch a virtual instance, install IRIS there, follow the instructions for installing Samples BI, and then impress the boss with beautiful charts and tables. So far so good. 

Inevitably, though, you’ll need to make changes.

Nowadays, most applications are deployed on public cloud services. It brings many advantages including savings in human and material resources, the ability to grow quickly and cheaply, greater availability, reliability, elastic scalability, and options to improve the protection of digital assets. One of the most popular options is AWS. It allows us to deploy our applications usings virtual machines (EC2 service), Docker containers (ECS service), or Kubernetes (EKS service).

I am often asked to review customers' IRIS application performance data to understand if system resources are under or over-provisioned.

This recent example is interesting because it involves an application that has done a "lift and shift" migration of a large IRIS database application to the Cloud. AWS, in this case.

A key takeaway is that once you move to the Cloud, resources can be right-sized over time as needed. You do not have to buy and provision on-premises infrastructure for many years in the future that you expect to grow into.

Continuous monitoring is required. Your application transaction rate will change as your business changes, the application use or the application itself changes. This will change the system resource requirements. Planners should also consider seasonal peaks in activity. Of course, an advantage of the Cloud is resources can be scaled up or down as needed.

For more background information, there are several in-depth posts on AWS and IRIS in the community. A search for "AWS reference" is an excellent place to start. I have also added some helpful links at the end of this post.

AWS services are like Lego blocks, different sizes and shapes can be combined. I have ignored networking, security, and standing up a VPC for this post. I have focused on two of the Lego block components;

• Compute requirements.
• Storage requirements.

I have been working on redesigning a Health Connect production which runs on a mirrored instance of Healthshare 2019. We were told to take advantage of containers. We got to work on IRIS 2020.1 and split the database part from the Interoperability part. We had the IRIS mirror running on EC2 instances and used containers to run IRIS interoperability application. Eventually we decided to run the data tier in containers as well. Later we switched from using EC2 instances to Fargate “server-less” compute.

About this article:

In InterSystems IRIS, the default form of access to the management portal is HTTP, which means that if the client is in the office and the server is in the cloud, many clients probably desire to encrypt their traffic in some way.

Thus, we would like to show you some ways to encrypt your traffic to and from the IRIS management portal (or various REST services) running on AWS.

This article uses the IRIS built-in apache server for access. It should not be used for benchmarking purposes or as a method of access from production environments applications.

As an IT and cloud team manager with 18 years of experience with InterSystems technologies, I recently led our team in the transformation of our traditional on-premises ERP system to a cloud-based solution. We embarked on deploying InterSystems IRIS within a Kubernetes environment on AWS EKS, aiming to achieve a scalable, performant, and secure system. Central to this endeavor was the utilization of the AWS Application Load Balancer (ALB) as our ingress controller.

Purpose

Most CloudFormation articles are Linux-based (no wonder), but there seems to be a demand for automation for Windows as well. Based on this original article by Anton, I implemented an example of deploying a mirror cluster to Windows servers using CloudFormation.I also added a simple walk through.
The complete source code can be found here.

Update: 2021 March 1 I added a way to connect to Windows shell by public key authentication via a bastion host as a one-liner.

Hello Newman

So given the STAR method on how to introduce Newman with this effort, here it goes.

Being interoperable is more and more important nowadays. InterSystems IRIS 2022.1 comes with a new messaging API to communicate with event streaming platforms like Kafka, AWS SQS/SNS, JMS and RabbitMQ.
This article shows how you can connect to Kafka and AWS SQS easily.
We start with a brief discussion of the basic concepts and terms of event streaming platforms. 

Event streaming platforms purpose and common terms

Event streaming platforms like Kafka or AWS SQS are capable to consume a unbound stream of events in a very high frequency and can react to events.

Hi guys,

It's FHIR contest and this time, they provided something really cool: FHIRaaS

And to be part of this, @José Pereira and I team up (again) to deliver something easy to use and easy to understand how we did.

I have started working on utilizing Epic on FHIR about a month ago.

Creating a Public Private Key Pair

mkdir /home/ec2-user/path_to_key
openssl genrsa -out ./path_to_key/privatekey.pem 2048

For backend apps, you can export the public key to a base64 encoded X.509 certificate named publickey509.pem using this command...

openssl req -new -x509 -key ./path_to_key/privatekey.pem -out ./path_to_key/publickey509.pem -subj '/CN=medbank'

where '/CN=medbank' is the subject name (for example the app name) the key pair is

Introduction

Accessing Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) buckets programmatically is a common requirement for many applications. However, setting up and managing AWS accounts is daunting and expensive, especially for small-scale projects or local development environments. In this article, we'll explore how to overcome this hurdle by using Localstack to simulate AWS services. Localstack mimics most AWS services, meaning one can develop and test applications without incurring any costs or relying on an internet connection, which can be incredibly useful for rapid development and debugging. We used ObjectScript with embedded Python to communicate with Intersystems IRIS and AWS simultaneously. Before beginning, ensure you have Python and Docker installed on your system. When Localstack is set up and running, the bucket can be created and used. 

Hi colleagues!

Often when we collaborate to someone's repo in GitHub we do the following cycle:

Fork-Clone-Change-Commit-Push-Pull-Request-Merge to the original repo.

This is all great and works fine!

And if we want to make a second collaboration right after the merge you need to perform "Fetch upstream" to your forked repo first to "ingest" your own Pull-request in the original repo.

Geeky git-professionals do it with ease but this was always a headache for me so I usually simply deleted the fork and created a new one.

And today I figured that Github added a new UI feature that I can easily fetch-upstream for my fork with the original one and make it up to date and capable for pull-requests.

Here is where the button is:

This is a relief! )

Wanted to share this relief and productivity tip with you!

Bring more collaborations to Github repos!

And speaking of PR - I just made a PR with docker to Google Cloud Run deployment for the FHIRaaS demo made by @Anton Umnikov for the current FHIR Contest! Looking for more of your contributions!

I heard about Message Bank when we started redesigning a Health Connect production to run in containers in the cloud. Since there will be multiple IRIS containers, we were directed to utilize Message Bank as one place to view messages and logs from all containers.

How does Message Bank work?

I added Message Bank operation to our Interoperability Production. It automatically sends messages and event logs to the Message Bank.

Resending Messages

The Message Bank provides an interface for portal user to resend messages from the Message Bank portal.

Like hardware hosts, virtual hosts in public and private clouds can develop resource bottlenecks as workloads increase. If you are using and managing InterSystems IRIS instances deployed in public or private clouds, you may have encountered a situation in which addressing performance or other issues requires increasing the capacity of an instance's host (that is, vertically scaling).

One common reason to scale is insufficient memory.

In this article, I am trying to walk through my deploying step of IAM on my EC2(ubuntu).

What is IAM?

IAM is InterSystems API Manager
you may reference to the link below to get more idea about IAM

https://docs.intersystems.com/components/csp/docbook/Doc.View.cls?KEY=PAGE_apimgr

Before deploying IAM

Check the license of your API host

Enable the User IAM

Deploy IAM

Reference 

https://community.intersystems.com/post/introducing-intersystems-api-manager

Download the image from the following link

https://wrc.intersystems.com/wrc/coDistGen.

Introduction

As the health interoperability landscape expands to include data exchange across on-premise as well as hosted solutions, we are seeing an increased need to integrate with services such as cloud storage. One of the most prolifically used and well supported tools is the NoSQL database DynamoDB (Dynamo), provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS).

The challenge for IRIS implementations, as it relates to Dynamo and other modern web services, is that there is no native support for interacting with Dynamo and AWS within ObjectScript.

I have described my efforts to optimize IRIS Mirror deployment in AWS ElasticContainer Service (ECS) in my prior article.

IRIS Mirror in the cloud (AWS) | InterSystems Developer Community | AWS
 

I have come to the opinion that IRIS Mirror is not as reliable as needed when deployed in ECS. The root of the problem is the fact that ECS randomly assigns one of the available IP addresses to each EC2 host or Fargate task it starts.

These get stored in iris.cpf file in MapMirrors section as shown here:

[MapMirrors.IRISMIRROR]

FAILOVER1=10.2ab.1cd.146,2188,,10.2ab.1cd.