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#Containerization

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Containerization is a lightweight alternative to full machine virtualization that involves encapsulating an application in a container with its own operating environment. 

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.

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Most of us are more or less familiar with Docker. Those who use it like it for the way it lets us easily deploy almost any application, play with it, break something and then restore the application with a simple restart of the Docker container.

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Article
· May 14, 2020 1m read
IRS Docker micro Durability

Allow limited durability for demo and development IRIS-Docker-micro-Durability During development of a container based demo I found the need to access a fresh docker
an instance of IRIS image (e.g intersystems/iris-community:2020.2.0.199.0) over and over.
To bypass loading my code repeatedly I developed this workaround.

It is a reduced variant of Docker - light weight durability

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I have Mac OSX and Docker Desktop 2.2 (Engine 19.03).

I have a REST service running on my localhost (Mac) and I was trying to consume it from IRIS running in a Docker container.

If you try something like that don't use localhost as HTTP Server setting (using a Business Operation for example).

You have to use host.docker.internal.

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Last time we launched an IRIS application in the Google Cloud using its GKE service.

And, although creating a cluster manually (or through gcloud) is easy, the modern Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) approach advises that the description of the Kubernetes cluster should be stored in the repository as code as well. How to write this code is determined by the tool that’s used for IaC.

In the case of Google Cloud, there are several options, among them Deployment Manager and Terraform. Opinions are divided as to which is better: if you want to learn more, read this Reddit thread Opinions on Terraform vs. Deployment Manager? and the Medium article Comparing GCP Deployment Manager and Terraform.

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¡Hi everybody!

As you likely are aware, the new version of InterSystems IRIS for Health (I4H) it's already available in Docker Hub. It's the Community version and is free and fully functional. There have been comments about it in other articles and posts,... so today I won't add anything about features. Here I want to explore "the mistery about the disappearance, or better, absence of our persistent data when we run a container with the durable option" (I didn't find a terrifying font to emphasize the thriller... post editor is not terrific for styling smiley ) .

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Hi Developers!

Those who use Dockerfile to work with InterSystems IRIS often need to execute several lines of ObjectScript. For me, this was a game of "escaping this and that" every time just to shoot a few commands on ObjectScript to IRIS. Ideally, I'd prefer to code ObjectScript without any quotes and escaping.

Recently I found a nice "hack" on how this could be improved to exactly this state. I got this from @Dmitry Maslennikov's repo and this lets you use Objectscript in a way as you would type it in IRIS terminal.

Here is what you have in dockerfile:

///
COPY irissession.sh /
SHELL ["/irissession.sh"]
RUN \
  do $SYSTEM.OBJ.Load("Installer.cls", "ck") \
  set sc = ##class(App.Installer).setup()
# bringing the standard shell back
SHELL ["/bin/bash", "-c"]
CMD [ "-l", "/usr/irissys/mgr/messages.log" ]
///

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Hi Developers!

InterSystems Package Manager (ZPM) is a great thing, but it is even better if you don't need to install it but can use immediately.

There are several ways how to do this and here is one approach of having IRIS container with ZPM built with dockerfile.

I've prepared a repository which has a few lines in dockerfile which perform the download and install the latest version of ZPM.

Add these lines to your standard dockerfile for IRIS community edition and you will have ZPM installed and ready to use.

To download the latest ZPM client:

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The last time that I created a playground for experimenting with machine learning using Apache Spark and an InterSystems data platform, see Machine Learning with Spark and Caché, I installed and configured everything directly on my laptop: Caché, Python, Apache Spark, Java, some Hadoop libraries, to name a few. It required some effort, but eventually it worked.

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This is a continuation of my story about the development of my project isc-tar started in the first part.

Just having tests is not enough, it does not mean that you will run tests after all changes. Running tests should be automated, and when you cover all your functionality with tests, everything should work well after any change in any place. And Continuous Integration (CI) helps to keep the code and deployment procedure with as fewer bugs as possible and automates the routine procedures, like publishing releases.

I use GitHub to store the source code. And some time ago GitHub started to work on its own CI/CD platform and named it GitHub Actions. It is not widely available, yet. You have to be signed as a beta tester for this feature, as I did. GitHub Actions uses quite a different way how to deal with a build workflow. What is important that Github Actions allows to use Docker, and it’s quite easy to customize available actions. And interesting that GitHub Actions is really much bigger than any classic CI like we have in Travis, Circle or Gitlab CI and so on. You can find more in the official documentation.

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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

In the previous 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. Still, our focus was on the implementation part of software development, but this part presents:

  • GitLab Workflow - a complete software life cycle process - from idea to user feedback
  • Continuous Delivery - software engineering approach in which teams produce software in short cycles, ensuring that the software can be reliably released at any time. It aims at building, testing, and releasing software faster and more frequently.

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Everybody has a testing environment.

Some people are lucky enough to have a totally separate environment to run production in.

-- Unknown

.

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
  • GitLab CI/CD
  • CI/CD with containers

This first part deals with the cornerstone of modern software development - Git version control system and various Git flows.

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Article
· Jan 31, 2018 3m read
Container - What is a 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.

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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.

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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
  • CD using ICM

In this article, we'll build Continuous Delivery with InterSystems Cloud Manager. ICM is a cloud provisioning and deployment solution for applications based on InterSystems IRIS. It allows you to define the desired deployment configuration and ICM would provision it automatically. For more information take a look at First Look: ICM.

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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
  • GitLab CI/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 this article let's discuss main components you'll need to run a continuous delivery pipeline with containers and how they all work together.

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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?
  • GitLab CI/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 this article, let's talk about containers and how (and why) they can be used.

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Container Images

In this second post on containers fundamentals, we take a look at what container images are.

What is a container image?

A container image is merely a binary representation of a container.

A running container or simply a container is the runtime state of the related container image.

Please see the first post that explains what a container is.

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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.

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