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.

++ Update: August 1, 2018

The use of the InterSystems Virtual IP (VIP) address built-in to Caché database mirroring has certain limitations. In particular, it can only be used when mirror members reside the same network subnet. When multiple data centers are used, network subnets are not often “stretched” beyond the physical data center due to added network complexity (more detailed discussion here). For similar reasons, Virtual IP is often not usable when the database is hosted in the cloud.

Network traffic management appliances such as load balancers (physical or virtual) can be used to achieve the same level of transparency, presenting a single address to the client applications or devices. The network traffic manager automatically redirects clients to the current mirror primary’s real IP address. The automation is intended to meet the needs of both HA failover and DR promotion following a disaster. 

Last week saw the launch of the InterSystems IRIS Data Platform in sunny California.

For the engaging eXPerience Labs (XP-Labs) training sessions, my first customer and favourite department (Learning Services), was working hard assisting and supporting us all behind the scene.

In my previous article, I gave an example of how to get the own image with InterSystems Caché. Now it's time to launch a project with container.

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. 

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.

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.

Hi Community!

We are glad to invite every developer who uses ObjectSript and VSCode plugin to the second webinar hold by the VSCode ObjectScript plugin developer on May 26  at 11:00 EDT. 

You will learn how to develop InterSystems IRIS solutions using GitHub Development Flow with VSCode ObjectScript and Docker.

Speaker: @Dmitriy Maslennikov, InterSystems Developers Advocate, CTO at CaretDev.

Loading your IRIS Data to your Google Cloud Big Query Data Warehouse and keeping it current can be a hassle with bulky Commercial Third Party Off The Shelf ETL platforms, but made dead simple using the iris2bq utility.

Let's say IRIS is contributing to workload for a Hospital system, routing DICOM images, ingesting HL7 messages,  posting FHIR resources, or pushing CCDA's to next provider in a transition of care.  Natively, IRIS persists these objects in various stages of the pipeline via the nature of the business processes and anything you included along the way.  Lets send that up to Google Big Query to augment and compliment the rest of our Data Warehouse data and ETL (Extract Transform Load) or ELT (Extract Load Transform) to our hearts desire.

A reference architecture diagram may be worth a thousand words, but 3 bullet points may work out a little bit better:

• It exports the data from IRIS into DataFrames
• It saves them into GCS as .avro to keep the schema along the data: this will avoid to specify/create the BigQuery table schema beforehands.
• It starts BigQuery jobs to import those .avro into the respective BigQuery tables you specify.

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.

Hey Developers,

We're pleased to invite you to join the next InterSystems IRIS 2020.1 Tech Talk: DevOps on June 2nd  at 10:00 AM EDT! 

In this InterSystems IRIS 2020.1 Tech Talk, we focus on DevOps. We'll talk about InterSystems System Alerting and Monitoring, which offers unified cluster monitoring in a single pane for all your InterSystems IRIS instances. It is built on Prometheus and Grafana, two of the most respected open source offerings available.

Next, we'll dive into the InterSystems Kubernetes Operator, a special controller for Kubernetes that streamlines InterSystems IRIS deployments and management. It's the easiest way to deploy an InterSystems IRIS cluster on-prem or in the Cloud, and we'll show how you can configure mirroring, ECP, sharding and compute nodes, and automate it all.

Finally, we'll discuss how to speed test InterSystems IRIS using the open source Ingestion Speed Test. This tool is available on InterSystems Open Exchange for your own testing and benchmarking. 

Hi Everyone,

Are you ready yet? Have you packed all you'll need for the summit? And don't forget the needed power-socket adapters if you come from outside the US! 

Have you signed up for the Container Bootcamp on Sunday? Or one of the various Experience Labs, the many informative sessions and one of the symposia on Wednesday afternoon?

Again, there is a mobile app for attendees that should help you keep it all under control and even allow you to book time with InterSystems personnel for a one-on-one deep-dive on whatever you need.

Now that the InterSystems IRIS Data Platform Community Edition is available on Docker Hub (https://hub.docker.com/_/intersystems-iris-data-platform), it seems like a great time to try InterSystems IRIS in a container.

In an earlier article (hope, you’ve read it), we took a look at the CircleCI deployment system, which integrates perfectly with GitHub. Why then would we want to look any further? Well, GitHub has its own CI/CD platform called GitHub Actions, which is worth exploring. With GitHub Actions, you don’t need to rely on some external, albeit cool, service.

In this article we’re going to try using GitHub Actions to deploy the server part of  InterSystems Package Manager, ZPM-registry, on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE).