#Best Practices

In this series of articles, I'd like to present and discuss several possible approaches toward software development with InterSystems technologies and GitLab. I will cover such topics as:

• Git 101
• Git flow (development process)
• GitLab installation
• GitLab Workflow
• Continuous Delivery
• GitLab installation and configuration
• GitLab CI/CD
• Why containers?
• Containers infrastructure
• CD using containers

In the first article, we covered Git basics, why a high-level understanding of Git concepts is important for modern software development, and how Git can be used to develop software.

In the second article, we covered GitLab Workflow - a complete software life cycle process and Continuous Delivery.

In the third article, we covered GitLab installation and configuration and connecting your environments to GitLab

In the fourth article, we wrote a CD configuration.

In the fifth article, we talked about containers and how (and why) they can be used.

In the sixth article let's discuss main components you'll need to run a continuous delivery pipeline with containers and how they all work together.

In this article, we'll build Continuous Delivery configuration discussed in the previous articles.

In this post, I am going to detail how to set up a mirror using SSL, including generating the certificates and keys via the Public Key Infrastructure built in to InterSystems IRIS Data Platform. I did a similar post in the past for Caché, so feel free to check that out here if you are not running InterSystems IRIS. Much like the original, the goal of this is to take you from new installations to a working mirror with SSL, including a primary, backup, and DR async member, along with a mirrored database. I will not go into security recommendations or restricting access to the files. This is meant to just simply get a mirror up and running. Example screenshots are taken on a 2018.1.1 version of IRIS, so yours may look slightly different.

Background

InterSystems IRIS 2019 is going to introduce new and exciting features. One of the areas with new interesting must-to-know things is the API Management.

Managed File Transfer (MFT) feature of InterSystems IRIS enables easy inclusion of a third-party file transfer service directly into an InterSystems IRIS production. Currently, DropBox, Box, and Kiteworks cloud disks are available.

In this article, I'd like to describe how to add more cloud storage platforms.

Here's what we're going to talk about:

• What is MFT
• Reference: Dropbox
  • Connection
  • Interoperability
  • Direct access
• Interfaces you need to implement
  • Connection
  • Logic
• Installation

Some time ago I got a WRC case transferred where a customer asks for the availability of a raw DEFLATE compression/decompression function built-in Caché.

When we talk about DEFLATE we need to talk about Zlib as well, since Zlib is the de-facto standard free compression/decompression library developed in the mid-90s.

Zlib works on particular DEFLATE compression/decompression algorithm and the idea of encapsulation within a wrapper (gzip, zlib, etc.).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zlib

Intro

For many in today's interoperability landscape, REST reigns supreme. With the overabundance of tools and approaches to REST API development, what tools do you choose and what do you need to plan for before writing any code?
This article focuses on design patterns and considerations that allow you to build highly robust, adaptive, and consistent REST APIs. Viable approaches to challenges of CORS support and authentication management will be discussed, along with various tips and tricks and best tools for all stages of REST API development. Learn about the open-source REST APIs available for InterSystems IRIS Data Platform and how they tackle the challenge of ever-increasing API complexity.
The article is a write-up for a recent webinar on the same topic.

If you’ve ever wondered whether there is a way to regulate access to resources in Caché, wonder no more. In version 2014.2 special classes were added that allow developers to work with semaphores.

I needed to know programmatically if last ran failed or not.

After some exploring, here's the code:

ClassMethod isLastTestOk() As %Boolean
{
  set in = ##class(%UnitTest.Result.TestInstance).%OpenId(^UnitTest.Result)
  for i=1:1:in.TestSuites.Count() {
    #dim suite As %UnitTest.Result.TestSuite
    set suite = in.TestSuites.GetAt(i)
    return:suite.Status=0 $$$NO
  }
  quit $$$YES
}

InterSystems Data Platform includes utilities and tools for system monitoring and alerting, however System Administrators new to solutions built on the InterSystems Data Platform (a.k.a Caché) need to know where to start and what to configure.

This guide shows the path to a minimum monitoring and alerting solution using references from online documentation and developer community posts to show you how to enable and configure the following;

1. Caché Monitor: Scans the console log and sends emails alerts.

2. System Monitor: Monitors system status and resources, generating notifications (alerts and warnings) based on fixed parameters and also tracks overall system health.

3. Health Monitor: Samples key system and user-defined metrics and compares them to user-configurable parameters and established normal values, generating notifications when samples exceed applicable or learned thresholds.

4. History Monitor: Maintains a historical database of performance and system usage metrics.

5. pButtons: Operating system and Caché metrics collection scheduled daily.

Remember this guide is a minimum configuration, the included tools are flexible and extensible so more functionality is available when needed. This guide skips through the documentation to get you up and going. You will need to dive deeper into the documentation to get the most out of the monitoring tools, in the meantime, think of this as a set of cheat sheets to get up and running.

I have a few cubes and numerous dashboards and I am ready to deploy them to our end users and administrators. How to configure DeepSee so that users don’t disrupt each other’s areas and are restricted from using functionalities specific to developers?

Containers

With the launch of InterSystems IRIS Data Platform, we provide our product even in a Docker container. But what is a container?

The fundamental container definition is that of a sandbox for a process.

Containers are software-defined packages that have some similarities to virtual machines (VM) like for example they can be executed.

Containers provide isolation without a full OS emulation. Containers are therefore much lighter than a VM.

Google Cloud Platform (GCP) provides a feature rich environment for Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) as a cloud offering fully capable of supporting all of InterSystems products including the latest InterSystems IRIS Data Platform. Care must be taken, as with any platform or deployment model, to ensure all aspects of an environment are considered such as performance, availability, operations, and management procedures. Specifics of each of those areas will be covered in this article.