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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. 

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:

Open Exchange app
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Hi Community,

In my previous article, we learned topics listed below:

  1. What is Docker?
  2. Some of the Docker benefits
  3. How does Docker work?
  4. Docker Image
  5. Docker Container
  6. Docker Image repository
  7. InterSystems's Docker image repository
  8. Docker Installation
  9. Docker Basic Commands
  10. Running IRIS community edition by using Docker
  11. Docker Desktop GUI

In this article, we will cover the following topics:

  1. Use of Docker Compose file (a YAML file)
  2. Use of Docker file (employed to build a Docker image)
  3. Use of Docker volume

So let's begin.

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Article
· Aug 4, 2021 3m read
IRIS Mirror in the cloud (AWS)

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.

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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" ]
///

Open Exchange app
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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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This article is a continuation of Deploying InterSystems IRIS solution on GKE Using GitHub Actions, in which, with the help of GitHub Actions pipeline, our zpm-registry was deployed in a Google Kubernetes cluster created by Terraform. In order not to repeat, we’ll take as a starting point that:

Open Exchange app
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I have just created a new Global Master Topic, "IRIS Cheatsheets". IRIS has introduced a lot of new functionality, especially in scripting languages, FHIR R4 support, enhanced Interoperability Tools, and IRIS Analytics. Having spent 35 years working on Windows-based PC's and Laptops, I have surprisingly little knowledge of Linux, Docker and Git. Furthermore, I have written almost every application and Interface in ObjectScript with splatterings of SQL, .Net, and Java Gateways and the most basic knowledge of WinSCP, Putty, SSH. All that changed when I received my first Raspberry Pi.

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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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Article
· Jan 26, 2022 4m read
Container configuration management

If you're deploying to more than one environment/region/cloud/customer, you will inevitably encounter the issue of configuration management.

While all (or just several) of your deployments can share the same source code, some parts, such as configuration (settings, passwords) differ from deployment to deployment and must be managed somehow.

In this article, I will try to offer several tips on that topic. This article talks mainly about container deployments.

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I work as an Integration Engineer for United States Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). I work on a Health Connect production which processes many RecordMap files. I do not fully understand RecordMaps and I wanted to develop an application for the Interoperability contest where I could learn more about working with RecordMaps. I browsed InterSystems documentation for inspiration on how to start. I was happy to find CSV Record Wizard.

Open Exchange app
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Article
· Feb 24, 2023 2m read
InterSystems IRIS in Containers

InterSystems has also released IRIS as containerized deployments. This post is to demonstrate how InterSystems IRIS and applications those rely on IRIS a backend can be packaged into an image and be run in other machines in containers and how simple it is to do that.

A container runs image/s which have all the necessary executables, binary code, libraries, and configuration files. And the images can be moved from one machine to another, and an images repository like Docker Hub can simplify that process.

I have used an application from Open Exchange for this demo.

Open Exchange app
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Article
· Feb 24 2m read
The bewitched line terminator

I want to address the nasty problems about reading a flat text in ASCII, UTF*
explicitly excluding HTML, EBCDIC, and other encoding.
According to Wikipedia there are at least 8 variations of control characters.

  • CR+LF is typical for Windows
  • LF is typical for the Linux/UNIX world
  • CR is Mac's favorite

As you can deduct from the names the inspiration comes from mechanical typewriters.

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Article
· Sep 9, 2022 1m read
DC Analytics Open Application

InterSystems Developer Community analytics. Project made with InterSystems IRIS BI (DeepSee), Power BI and Logi Report Designer to visualize and analyze members, articles, questions, answers, views and other pieces of content and activity on InterSystems Developer Community.

You can see your own activity, articles and questions. Track how your contribution changes developer community.

Open Exchange app
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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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For those that, at some point, need to test what means that of ECP for horizontal escalability (computing power and/or users and processes concurrency), but they're lazy o have no much time to build the environment, configure the server nodes, etc..., I've just published in Open Exchange the app/sample OPNEx-ECP Deployment .

Open Exchange app
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Article
· Mar 25 7m read
Introduction to Kubernetes

In this article, we will cover below topics:

  • What is Kubernetes?
  • Main Kubernetes (K8s) Components


What is Kubernetes?

Kubernetes is an open-source container orchestration framework developed by Google. In essence, it controls container speed and helps you manage applications consisting of multiple containers. Additionally, it allows you to operate them in different environments, e.g., physical machines, virtual machines, Cloud environments, or even hybrid deployment environments.

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In case you're planning on deploying IRIS For Health, or any of our containerized products, via the IKO on OpenShift, I wanted to share some of the hurdles we had to overcome.

As with any IKO based installation, we first need to deploy the IKO itself. However we were getting this error:

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Article
· Jan 21 1m read
Debugging a crashing container

I have been struggling with a docker run command that kept crashing, the error message was too generic to point me to the right direction.

Since the container is shut down after the failure, I was unable to login to it in order to figure out the problem.

I had to run the container in a way that I'll be able to log into it before it crashed, so I found the adding -u false prevents the docker run command to run the iris session IRIS and the container stayed up and running. then I was able to log into it using:

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Article
· Apr 30 3m read
mg_web for ObjectScript Developers

A few weeks ago I posted an announcement about a JavaScript-based interface for our mg_web WebServer interfacing addon module. mg_web isn't just restricted to use by JavaScript developers though. Many readers will be ObjectScript developers who are more used to using CSP as their web gateway. Some may even have much older legacy WebLink-based applications (and be wondering how to support them given that IRIS does not support WebLink).

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