The IKO documentation is robust. A single web page, that consists of about 50 actual pages of documentation. For beginners that can be a bit overwhelming. As the saying goes: how do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. Let's start with the first bite: helm.

What is Helm?

Helm is to Kubernetes what the InterSystems Package Manager (IPM, formerly ObjectScript Package Manager - ZPM) is to IRIS.

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Hi folks!

Often, when we develop commercial solutions, there is a necessity to deploy solutions without source code, e.g., in order to preserve the IP.

One of the ways how this can be achieved is to use InterSystems Package Manager.

Here I asked Midjourney to paint an intellectual property of software:

How this can be achieved with IPM?

In fact, this is very simple; just add the Deploy="true" clause in the Resource element in your module.xml manifest. Documentation.

I decided to provide the simplest possible example to illustrate how it works and also to give you a development environment template to let start building and deploying your own modules without source code. He we go!

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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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The IKO will dynamically provision storage in the form of persistent volumes and pods will claim them via persistent volume claims.

But storage can come in different shapes and sizes. The blueprint to the details about the persistent volumes comes in the form of the storage class.

This raises the question: we've deployed the IrisCluster, and haven't specified a storage class yet. So what's going on?

You'll notice that with a simple

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Your may not realize it, but your InterSystems Login Account can be used to access a very wide array of InterSystems services to help you learn and use InterSystems IRIS and other InterSystems technologies more effectively. Continue reading to learn more about how to unlock new technical knowledge and tools using your InterSystems Login account. Also - after reading, please participate in the Poll at the bottom, so we can see how this article was useful to you!

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The IKO allows for sidecars. The idea behind them is to have direct access to a specific instance of IRIS. If we have mirrored data nodes, the web gateway will (correctly) only give us access to the primary node. But perhaps we need access to a specific instance. The sidecar is the solution.

Building on the example from the previous article, we introduce the sidecar by using a mirrored data node and of course arbiter.

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We now get to make use of the IKO.

Below we define the environment we will be creating via a Custom Resource Definition (CRD). It lets us define something outside the realm of what the Kubernetes standard knows (this is objects such as your pods, services, persistent volumes (and claims), configmaps, secrets, and lots more). We are building a new kind of object, an IrisCluster object.

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Hi, this post was initially written for Caché. In June 2023, I finally updated it for IRIS. If you are revisiting the post since then, the only real change is substituting Caché for IRIS! I also updated the links for IRIS documentation and fixed a few typos and grammatical errors. Enjoy :)

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I am often asked by customers, vendors or internal teams to explain CPU capacity planning for large production databases running on VMware vSphere.

In summary there are a few simple best practices to follow for sizing CPU for large production databases:

  • Plan for one vCPU per physical CPU core.
  • Consider NUMA and ideally size VMs to keep CPU and memory local to a NUMA node.
  • Right-size virtual machines. Add vCPUs only when needed.

Generally this leads to a couple of common questions:

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Article
· Nov 2, 2023 3m read
How to hide the source program

InterSystems FAQ rubric

For routines (*.mac)

You can hide the source by exporting/importing only the *.obj that is generated after compiling the source program.

The command execution example specifies EX1Sample.obj and EX2Sample.obj, which are generated by compiling EX1Sample.mac and EX2Sample.mac, as export targets and exports them to the second argument file.

After moving to another namespace, I am using the exported XML file to perform the import.

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Article
· Jul 4, 2023 2m read
Build iris image with cpf merge

When it comes to build an iris image, we can use the cpf merge files.

Here is an cpf merge example:

[Actions]
CreateDatabase:Name=IRISAPP_DATA,Directory=/usr/irissys/mgr/IRISAPP_DATA

CreateDatabase:Name=IRISAPP_CODE,Directory=/usr/irissys/mgr/IRISAPP_CODE

CreateNamespace:Name=IRISAPP,Globals=IRISAPP_DATA,Routines=IRISAPP_CODE,Interop=1

ModifyService:Name=%Service_CallIn,Enabled=1,AutheEnabled=48

CreateApplication:Name=/frn,NameSpace=IRISAPP,DispatchClass=Formation.REST.Dispatch,AutheEnabled=48

ModifyUser:Name=SuperUser,PasswordHash=a31d24aecc0bfe560a7e45bd913ad27c667dc25a75cbfd358c451bb595b6bd52bd25c82cafaa23ca1dd30b3b4947d12d3bb0ffb2a717df29912b743a281f97c1,0a4c463a2fa1e7542b61aa48800091ab688eb0a14bebf536638f411f5454c9343b9aa6402b4694f0a89b624407a5f43f0a38fc35216bb18aab7dc41ef9f056b1,10000,SHA512
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When you install an IRIS or Caché instance on Windows Server, you'll usually need to install it under a specific user account that has network access permissions. This is very handy when you needs to access network resources for creating files or directly accessing printers.

TL;DR: see key takeaways at the bottom!

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Usualy, if you want to deploy a solution, you need to add the items, configure your lookup tables and default configuration manually.
It's okay if you have all the permissions and privileges to perform these actions. If you want to deploy to a client's production server, and you don't have the permissions, you need to indicate in a document ALL the steps that the deployment manager has to perform.

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Some Usage cases

1. A deployment may consist of two high availability instances and two disaster recovery instances in a different data center.

The corresponding UAT environment could replicate this giving a total of 8 instances. How do you confirm CPF and Scheduled task alignment across ALL instances.

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Suppose you have developed your own app with InterSystems technologies stack and now want to perform multiple deployments on the customers' side. During the development process you've composed a detailed installation guide for your application, because you need to not only import classes, but also fine-tune the environment according to your needs.
To address this specific task, InterSystems has created a special tool called %Installer. Read on to find out how to use it.

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Overview

Predictable storage IO performance with low latency is vital to provide scalability and reliability for your applications. This set of benchmarks is to inform users of IRIS considering deploying applications in AWS about EBS gp3 volume performance.

Summary

  • An LVM stripe can increase IOPS and throughput beyond single EBS volume performance limits.
  • An LVM stripe lowers read latency.
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Being interoperable is more and more important nowadays. InterSystems IRIS 2022.1 comes with a new messaging API to communicate with event streaming platforms like Kafka, AWS SQS/SNS, JMS and RabbitMQ.

This article shows how you can connect to Kafka and AWS SQS easily.
We start with a brief discussion of the basic concepts and terms of event streaming platforms.

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Article
· Jul 21, 2022 11m read
ECP With Docker

Hi community,

This is the third article in the series about initializing IRIS instances with Docker. This time, we will focus on Enterprise Cache Protocol (ECP).

In a very simplified way, ECP allows configuring some IRIS instances as application servers and others as data servers. Detailed technical information can be found in the official documentation.

This article aims to describe:

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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 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.

I this article we'll discuss:

  • GitLab installation and configuration
  • Connecting your environments to GitLab
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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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Hi folks!

Sometimes we need the docker image of the InterSystems IRIS solution we build to be published on some docker registry. The cases could be:

  1. Deploy it then in Kubernetes cluster
  2. Let your pal run the image of your public repo without building it locally.

You can push the image to Docker Hub Registry or Github Registry.

In this very short article, I provide a way how to do it automatically on every push to your GitHub repository.

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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 .

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