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.

2. Another team (possibly in anther organization) makes changes to an IRIS instance to correct a problem, improve security, or modify shared system task configuration. Capture the CPF before and after to see what was done across instances.

Adding VSCode into your IRIS container

One of the easiest ways to setup repeatable development environments is to spin up containers for them. I find that when iterating quickly, it was very convenient to host a vscode instance within my development container. Thus, I have created a quick container script to add a browser-based vscode into an IRIS container. This should work for most 2021.1+ containers.

Apache Web Gateway with Docker

Hi, community.

In this article, we will programmatically configure an Apache Web Gateway with Docker using:

• HTTPS protocol.
• TLS\SSL to secure the communication between the Web Gateway and the IRIS instance.

We will use two images: one for the Web Gateway and the second one for the IRIS instance.

All necessary files are available in this GitHub repository.

Let’s start with a git clone:

git clone https://github.com/lscalese/docker-webgateway-sample.

History

Hi Community,

Have you already set up a mirrored environment? Does it have a private network, virtual IP address, and SSL configuration? After doing this a couple of times, I realized that it is long, and there are a lot of manual actions required to generate certificates and configure each IRIS instance. It is a pain in the neck for people who often have to do this.

Does anyone have experience with CircleCI or really any automation tool using %UnitTest?

I have built my app and ran my unit test in a Docker container automated by CircleCI.  However, after many of the tests failed I see:

How do you halt out of the IRIS session and return an exit code to the shell?

I have a script in my repo that I pass into IRIS after CircleCI does the code checkout

iris session IRIS < inFile

Am I trying to approach this the wrong way?  Should I be writing test output to a file or something?

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:

• How to script the initialization of a data server, and how to script the initialization of one or more application servers.
• How to establish an encrypted connection between these nodes with Docker.

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. 

Very recently Docker showed a very new feature added to their Docker Desktop tool. It was a good way to start using Docker on macOS and Windows, and they also released the same tool for Linux as well. And new feature Extensions add an ability to extend this GUI application with some extra abilities from extensions.

Hi Developers!

This is yet another short post that is intended to simplify developers' life. Now we'll talk about how to make GitHub run unit tests with every push to the repository by adding just one file to the repo. For free.  On Github Cloud. Sounds great, isn't it?

It is possible and very easy to do. Credit goes to @Dmitry Maslennikov (and his repo), ZPM Package Manager, and GitHub Actions.  Let's see how this all works!

So it appears that this feature is still missing in 2022.1 (https://docs.intersystems.com/iris20221/csp/docbook/DocBook.UI.Page.cls…).

Does anyone have any thoughts or ideas on how to create Namespace Package Mappings on deployment in a 'neat' way during automated deployment?

  I really like the ability to use merge cpf on deployment of our servers, but this one missing action is kind of holding me back.  Appreciate if anyone else has encountered this and how they approached it.

Cheers.

We’ve already considered how to run an IRIS-based application in GCP Kubernetes in Deploying InterSystems IRIS Solution into GCP Kubernetes Cluster GKE Using CircleCI. Additionally, we’ve seen how to run an IRIS-based application in AWS Kubernetes in Deploying a Simple IRIS-Based Web Application Using Amazon EKS. Now, let’s look at how to deploy an application to the Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS).

SAM - Hacks and Tips for set up and adding metrics from non-IRIS targets

SAM (System Altering and Monitoring) comes with as a 'batteries included' docker-compose container set that is ready to start monitoring IRIS instances with a default dashboard as soon as it starts up. The initial configuration is good to understand SAM functionality and start basic monitoring of your IRIS systems. However, out of the box, there are some setting s that you will need to change when you start to monitor many systems and collect a lot of metric data.

When start docker in VSCode:

C:\Git\ESKLP2\ESKLP>docker-compose build --no-cache
ERROR: The Compose file '.\docker-compose.yml' is invalid because:
Unsupported config option for services.iris: 'init'

Why? Please, help

Introduction
Several resources tell us how to run IRIS in a Kubernetes cluster, such as Deploying an InterSystems IRIS Solution on EKS using GitHub Actions and Deploying InterSystems IRIS solution on GKE Using GitHub Actions. These methods work but they require that you create Kubernetes manifests and Helm charts, which might be rather time-consuming.
To simplify IRIS deployment, InterSystems developed an amazing tool called InterSystems Kubernetes Operator (IKO). A number of official resources explain IKO usage in details, such as  New Video: Intersystems IRIS Kubernetes Operator and InterSystems Kubernetes Operator.

In this article, we’ll look at one of the ways to monitor the InterSystems IRIS data platform (IRIS) deployed in the Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). The GKE integrates easily with Cloud Monitoring, simplifying our task. As a bonus, the article shows how to display metrics from Cloud Monitoring in Grafana. 

Note that the Google Cloud Platform used in this article is not free (price list), but you can leverage a free tier. This article assumes that you already have a project in the Google Cloud Platform (referred to as <your_project_id>) and have permission to use it. 

Folks, 

I am looking to migrate a few legacy debt collection applications built using InterSystems Cache to AWS. Does anyone here have any experience, ideas and best practices on migrating Cache products to the public cloud?

Regards

Sudarshan

+1-917-685-3551

I want to start this project and wants to know the best practices, you guys using to arrange the project. I have done lot of mvc projects and API's in c#. But Intersystems is new to me. Please give me some suggestions like how can I Arrange the objects. Like for eg. Where can I store the productions objects like services,process and operations. will that be like under each resouces folder name? and what are the base classes, and how can I store them? basically please give me some idea about how Can I arrange them . 

Thank you 

Sai

Hi Developers,

Writing a script for the application deployment can be very interesting to ensure rapid deployment without forgetting anything. config-api is a library to help developers to write configuration scripts based on a JSON document.

Implemented features :

• Set system settings.
• Set security settings.
• Enable services.
• Configure namespaces, databases, mapping.
• Export existing configuration.
• All features are exposed with a RESTful API.

This library is focused on IRIS configuration to help applications deployment.

Hi Community,

Please welcome the new video on InterSystems Developers YouTube:

⏯ Best Practices for In-Platform AI

Hi Community,

Please welcome the new video on InterSystems Developers YouTube:

⏯ Automating InterSystems IRIS Instances Configuration

Hello,

We have a need to track Database changes over time - down to the SQL level of granularity if possible. Such as: User xyz runs routine ^abc and we get something similar to a changelog that tells us: table A had this value updated, insert, update etc....

Is that possible using IRIS level tools (Audit Log, Journal File, etc...) , is there a way to convert the global sets and kills from the journals into SQL level changes?

I also found a third-party java-based tool named Liquibase , but it seems more oriented to tracking schema and table based changes or pre-defined definitions.

Thanks,

James

All source code to the article is available at: https://github.com/antonum/ha-iris-k8s&nbsp;

In the previous article, we discussed how to set up IRIS on k8s cluster with high availability, based on the distributed storage, instead of traditional mirroring. As an example, that article used the Azure AKS cluster. In this one, we'll continue to explore highly available configurations on k8s. This time, based on Amazon EKS (AWS managed Kubernetes service) and would include an option for doing database backup and restore, based on Kubernetes Snapshot.

Installation

Let's get right to business.

I am pleased to announce the availability of InterSystems Container Registry. This provides a new distribution channel for customers to access container-based releases and previews. All Community Edition images are available in a public repository with no login required. All full released images (IRIS, IRIS for Health, Health Connect, System Alerting and Monitoring, InterSystems Cloud Manager) and utility images (such as arbiter, Web Gateway, and PasswordHash) require a login token, generated from your WRC account credentials.

In this article, I am going to give some examples to get your own docker image with InterSystems Caché/Ensemble.

Hi Everyone,

In the previous article, we combine ZPM with Config-API to load a configuration on module loading\install.
It could be useful for small applications, but for a large application, it's not convenient.

You can need to create multiple namespaces and install many zpm modules on different namespaces.
Using the configuration document on zpm load\install is a problem for this special case.
Moreover, even if you need only one module and one namespace, ZPM client is designed to install on the current namespace and it's not possible to switch to another namespace during the install.

Hi Developers,

In the previous article, we describe how to use config-api to configure IRIS.

Now, let's try to combine the library with the ZPM client.
The goal is to load a configuration document during zpm install at the configure phase.

For this exercise, a template repository is available here (this is based on objectscript-docker-template ).

We attempt to :

• Create a database MYAPPDATA.
• Set Globals mapping for dc.PackageSample.*.
• Add a user named SQLUserRO with read-only SQL role access.
• Add an SSL Configuration named SSLAppDefault.
• Create a REST application /rest/myapp.

Some changes in IRIS configuration require a restart of IRIS.
This is no big issue as long as I have access to the server command line with sufficient privileges.
In a container, this is not always given.
Stopping IRIS from the terminal/session prompt is no problem.
But the restart after is.  

Note1: container start-stop is no option as it might be removed by option --rm in docker run
Note2: the target is linux (manly in docker).  Windows is excluded

GitHub

We released a new version of ZPM (Package Manager)

New in ZPM 0.2.14 release:

• Publishing timeout
• Embedded vars usage in module parameters
• Package installation from Github repo
• Transaction support for install, load and publish.

See the details below.

I'm almost running out of disk space so I want to move 1 DB to a different hard drive.  
It's a rather simple but lengthy action during a shutdown of IRIS.  
But is this somehow possible under runtime in a stand-alone installation?  
I'm looking for kind of a "local drive failover"  
note: Mirror or Shadow is not an option.