#Containerization

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. Paradise. But, I worried. Would I ever be able to reproduce all those steps? Maybe. Would it be possible for a random Windows or Java update to wreck the whole thing in an instant? Almost certainly.

Hi Community!

We're pleased to announce that that InterSystems IRIS Community Edition is available on the Docker Store! InterSystems IRIS Community Edition is the no-cost developer edition designed to lower the barriers to entry to get started with IRIS. Now that it is listed on the Docker Store, running an IRIS Community instance is as easy as -

For more on running IRIS in containers check out our Documentation or one of the many Community posts on the topic!

I follow the instruction on docker site.
I have next troubles:

1. After changing password fom "SYS" to my pass I see on screen non removable "USER>". Standart commands "exit" and "quit" are not worked. Next actions is possible only in new terminal window.
2. I need some extra tool in container. Where I try install (by example "apt-get install mc") I get "E: Package 'mc' has no installation candidate". I don't understand why standart ubuntu package manager do not work in Iris container.

Dear team,

I am trying to experiment the Docker container in our development environment. I have successfully build an image and running the container. When I access the CSP portal home page ( http://<host-ip>:57772/csp/sys/%25CSP.Portal.Home.zen?$NAMESPACE=%25SYS), I am getting the following error:

I logged in to the running container (docker exec -it <container-id> sh), issued the command, 'ccontrol list' where the state says 'warn'.

Hi Community!

We're pleased to invite you to the DockerCon 2019 – the #1 container industry conference for all things Kubernetes, microservices, and DevOps. The event will be held at the Moscone Center in San Francisco from April 29 to May 2.

In addition, there will be a special session "Containerized Databases for Enterprise Applications" presented by @Thomas Carroll,  Product Specialist at InterSystems. 

See the details below.

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.

Hi Community!

When you run  IRIS container out-of-the-box and connect to it via terminal e.g. with:

docker-compose exec iris bash

You see something like:

root@7b19f545187b:/opt/app# irissession IRIS

Node: 7b19f545187b, Instance: IRIS

Username: ***

Password: ***

USER>

And you enter login and password every time.

How to programmatically setup docker-compose file to have IRIS container with OS authentication enabled? And have the following while entering the terminal:

root@7b19f545187b:/opt/app# irissession IRIS

Node: 7b19f545187b, Instance: IRIS

USER>

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.

For a solo developer developing web applications what will be the best  technology to use IRIS or Studio with cache database and containers for deployment

When I run the following cmd in Ubuntu 18.04

the container is created and stays running

But when I run this cmd, the container is created but exits immediately

Not sure why it is doing this.  if anyone can shed some light, it would be most appreciated.

After attending the Intersystems DACH conference in Germany at the end of last November and taking part in a few workshops about containers and microservices I took the plunge and installed Docker on home Windows PC, downloaded IRIS 2018.2 preview and got that up and running. Good stuff and I gave myself a pad on the shoulder at that point.

But then it dawned on me that I couldn't edit code using Studio as  Studio is Windows only and while I'm running on a Windows desktop the Docker image itself is Linux based.

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.

Note: there are more recent updates, see https://community.intersystems.com/post/updates-our-release-cadence

InterSystems is adopting a new approach to releasing InterSystems IRIS.  This blog explains the new release model and what customers should expect to see.  We laid this out at Global Summit at the end of the InterSystems IRIS roadmap session  and have received a lot of positive feedback from customers.

With this new model we offer two release streams:

1) An annual traditional release that we call EM (for Extended Maintenance)

2) A quarterly release that is tagged CD (for Continuous Delivery) and will be available only in a container format.

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.

Hi Community!

I'm pleased to announce that InterSystems IRIS is available on Microsoft Azure Marketplace!

→ InterSystems IRIS on Azure Marketplace

This is the second public cloud offering of InterSystems IRIS after recently announced Google Cloud Platform support.

I have already mentioned my project CacheBlocksExplorer recently in two articles

1. Internal Structure of Caché Database Blocks, Part 2
2. Internal Structure of Caché Database Blocks, Part 3

Now I would like to inform that this project can be easily run with docker.

Version for Caché and for InterSystems IRIS, now publicly available on docker hub.

Remember that you need the appropriate license key (for RedHat Linux) to be able to run this project.

Caché

docker run -d --rm \
 -p 8080:57772 \
 -v ~/cache.key:/usr/cachesys/mgr/cache.key \
 -v /some/your/cache/db:/opt/blocks/db/test \
 daimor/blocksexplorer:cache

Hi, Community!

Just want to let you know that InterSystems IRIS is available on Google Cloud Marketplace.

Start here to get your InterSystems IRIS VM on GCP.

Hi All,

Who, in the age of digital transformation, doesn't want to reap more benefits out of any process, procedure, and resource we have? At InterSystems Solution Developers Conference (part of InterSystems Global Summit 2018) we will have sessions on how to improve the way applications are built with modern tools like Docker containers, Gitlab, Circle CI, Travis, etc., how continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) processes can help us deliver more value quickly to the end-user, and how we can start thinking about modernizing traditional applications.

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.

Note: with support for Overlay storage driver for InterSystems IRIS containers this article is no longer relevant. The article is left here for archive purposes.

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.

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.

hi, new here, and new to cache and deepsee.

i've been trying to setup a copy of our production server so we can use it for testing/development.

i did a full  backup. moved it to the new server.  ran the DBREST command.  got it to restore but seems like permissions get all messed up. and it just generates a bunch of errors.

is there an easier/better way of doing this?

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.

Container images consist of a basic OS substratum and all the software we need to run our service. I use the term service for a given "container solution" as a generic description of a software solution wrapped in a container.

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.

Before the event, Learning Services set up the most complicated part of public cloud :) "credentials-for-free" for a smooth and fast experience for all our customers at the summit.

One for Luca, perhaps?

Interesting article here:

https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/containers-aren%E2%80%99t-just-applicati…

Would this be a fit for Cache / IRIS containerisation?

Not sure I fully "get" what's being proposed in the article, mind you.

Hi, Community! 

This week we have two videos. Check all new  session recordings from Global Summit 2017:

 1. Containers for InterSystems Technologies

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.

Just curious how many companies use in their work Docker containers, I mean not only with InterSystems products. And if such companies exist, which of them uses docker and doesn't  use it for InterSystems products  by some reasons. What are the reasons? For companies which already uses InterSystems in containers, how do you use it? Development environment, testing or even in production ?

And if you don't use but thought about it, what are the reasons which stop you.