As applications grow, every database eventually hits scaling limits. Whether it's storage capacity, concurrent users, query throughput, or I/O bandwidth, single-server architectures have inherent constraints. This guide explains fundamental approaches to database scalability and shows how InterSystems IRIS implements these patterns to support enterprise-scale workloads.

We'll explore two complementary scaling strategies: horizontal scaling for user volume (distributing computational load) and sharding for data volume (partitioning datasets). Understanding the general principles behind these approaches will help you make informed decisions about when and how to scale your IRIS applications.

The examples in this guide use InterSystems IRIS in Docker containers.

Security is fundamental to enterprise application development. InterSystems IRIS provides a comprehensive security framework that protects data, controls access, and ensures compliance. This guide introduces essential security features for developers new to IRIS, covering authentication, authorization, encryption, and practical implementation strategies.

In the modern world, the most valuable asset for companies is their data. Everything from business processes and applications to transactions is based on data which defines the success of the organization's operations, analysis, and decisions. In this scenario, the data structures need to be ready for frequent changes, yet in a managed and governed way. Otherwise, we will inevitably lose money, time, and quality of corporate solutions.
For a long time, data management and governance were solely based on the data itself, with excellent backup, restoration, ACID (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation

The Istio Service Mesh is commonly used to monitor communication between services in applications. The "battle-tested" sidecar mode is its most common implementation. It will add a sidecar container to each pod you have in your namespace that has Istio sidecar injection enabled.

It's quite easy to get started with, just put the istioctl executable in your PATH, and label your namespace such that it tells Istio to acitvate side car injection there.

>> kubectl get po -n iris
NAME                                              READY   STATUS    RESTARTS        AGE
intersystems-iris-operator-amd

IAM - InterSystems API Manager is a great tool for monitoring your traffic. If you are trying to use it in your Kubernetes cluster you may have tried doing a deployment similar to this one:

apiVersion: intersystems.com/v1alpha1
kind: IrisCluster
metadata:
  name: iris
spec:
  licenseKeySecret:
    name: iris-key-secret
  configSource:
    name: iris-cpf
  imagePullSecrets:
    - name: intersystems-pull-secret
  topology:
    data:
      image: containers.intersystems.com/intersystems/iris-arm64:2024.1
      compatibilityVersion: "2024.1.2"
      mirrored: false

    webgatewa

If you want to find out what exact version your Docker image is (and since the latest image tagging scheme you cannot just rely on the image tag; and assuming you don't want to actually run it just in order to find out) you can run this docker command:

Here are the technology bonuses for the InterSystems Developer Tools Contest 2025 that will give you extra points in the voting:

• IRIS Vector Search usage -3
• Embedded Python usage -3
• InterSystems Interoperability - 3
• InterSystems IRIS BI - 3
• VSCode Plugin - 3
• FHIR Tools - 3
• Docker container usage -2 
• ZPM Package Deployment - 2
• Implement InterSystems Community Idea - 4
• Find a bug in Embedded Python - 2
• Article on Developer Community - 2
• The second article on Developer Community - 1
• Video on YouTube - 3
• First Time Contribution - 3

See the details below.

If you look at the values.yaml of the IKO's Helm chart you'll find:

useIrisFsGroup:false

Let's break down what it is and in what situations you may want to set it to true.

FsGroup refers to the file system group.

By default, Kubernetes volumes are owned by root, but we need IRIS to own its files (IRIS in containers is installed under irisowner user). To get around this we employ one of two methods:

1) initContainers

The initContainers run before app containers (like IRIS) in a pod. They generally set up the environment for the application and then run to completion/terminate. The initC

Hi!
I have installed IRIS 2024.1 in RHEL 9.5, using the following 

sudo ISC_PACKAGE_INSTANCENAME="IRISTEST01" ISC_PACKAGE_INSTALLDIR="/iris" \
ISC_PACKAGE_UNICODE="N"  ISC_PACKAGE_INITIAL_SECURITY="Normal" \
ISC_PACKAGE_INSTALL_INTEGRATEDML="N" ISC_PACKAGE_MGRUSER="irisowner" \
ISC_PACKAGE_MGRGROUP="irismgr" ISC_PACKAGE_USER_PASSWORD="**************"  \
ISC_PACKAGE_IRISUSER="irisusr" ISC_PACKAGE_IRISGROUP="irisgrp" \
ISC_PACKAGE_CSPSYSTEM_PASSWORD="**************" ISC_PACKAGE_WEB_CONFIGURE="Y" \
ISC_PACKAGE_WEB_SERVERTYPE="Apache" ISC_PACKAGE_WEB_APACHE_VERSION="2.4" \
ISC_PACKAGE_WEB_A

In this article I'll show you how to set up in your laptop, very quickly, a cluster of IRIS nodes in sharding. It's not the goal of this article neither to talk about sharding in detail nor define a deployment of a production ready architecture, but to show how to set up quickly, in your own machine, a cluster of IRIS instances configured as shard nodes, with which you'll able to play and test this functionality. If you're insterested in knowing more about sharding in IRIS, take a look at the documentation clicking here.  

First and foremost, I want to remark that IRIS sharding will allow us 2 things:

• Define, load and query shard tables, which data will be distributed transparently between the cluster's nodes
• Define  federated tables, which offer a global and composed view of data belonging to different tables that will be physically stored in different distributed nodes

So, as I said, we let for other article playing with shard or federated tables, and just focus now in the previous step, that is, setting up the cluster of shard nodes.

All pods are assigned a Quality of Service (QoS). These are 3 levels of priority pods are assigned within a node.

The levels are as following:

1) Guaranteed: High Priority

2) Burstable: Medium Priority

3) BestEffort: Low Priority

It is a way of telling the kubelet what your priorities are on a certain node if resources need to be reclaimed. This great GIF below by Anvesh Muppeda explains it.

If resources need to be freed, firstly pods with Best Effort QoS will be evicted, then those with Burstable, and finally those with Guaranteed. The idea is that hopefully by evicting the pods that ar

Hi everyone,

In this article, I’m excited to introduce CodeInspector, a tool designed to simplify code validation by applying custom rules tailored to your development requirements. Whether you're managing a large codebase or working in an agile environment, CodeInspector helps ensure code quality by offering flexibility and adaptability to specific project needs.

Motivation

The idea behind CodeInspector was to build a tool that is both easy to implement and adaptable to different business contexts. By allowing teams to define their own validation rules, CodeInspector empowers developers to

Say I want to uninstall the IKO - all I need to do is:

> helm uninstall intersystems

What happens behind the scenes is that helm will uninstall what was installed when you ran :

> helm install intersystems <relative/path/to/iris-operator>

In some sense - this is symmetric to when we ran install - however with a different image.

You'll notice that when you install, it knows what image to take from:

operator:
  registry: containers.intersystems.com
  repository: intersystems/iris-operator-amd
  tag: 3.7.13.100

For uninstall the image to take note of is:

cleaner:
  registry: appscode

Is there a way to export and import web application configuration? For example to save it to version control (git) and to import it to other server.

By web application configuration I mean "System -> Security Management -> Web Applications". Sreenshot from it:

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:

Warning FailedCreate 75s (x16 over 3m59s) replicaset-controller Error creating: pods "intersystems-iris-operator-amd-f6757dcc-" is forbidden: unable to validate against any security context constraint:

proceeded by a list of all the security context constraints (SCCs) it could not validate against.

If you'r

Hi All,

On February 8, 2024, we asked for input from the IRIS community regarding exam topics for our InterSystems IRIS Developer Professional exam. We will close the window for providing feedback on the exam topics on Friday, March 8, 2024. If you would like to have your say in what topics are covered on the exam, this is your last chance!

How can I access the survey? You can access it here

• Survey does not work well on mobile devices - you can access it, but it will involve a lot of scrolling
• Survey can be resumable if you return to it on the same device in the same browser - answers sa

Hello Everyone,

The Certification Team of InterSystems Learning Services is developing an InterSystems IRIS Developer Professional certification exam, and we are reaching out to our community for feedback that will help us evaluate and establish the contents of this exam.

Note: This exam will replace the current InterSystems IRIS Core Solutions Developer Specialist exam when it is released. Please note from the target role description below that the focus of the new exam will be more on developer best practices and a lot less on the ObjectScript programming language.

How do I provide my inp

Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) is a feature of Windows that allows you to run a Linux environment on your Windows machine, without the need for a separate virtual machine or dual booting. 

WSL is designed to provide a seamless and productive experience for developers who want to use both Windows and Linux at the same time**.

WSL 2 is the default distro type when installing a Linux distribution. WSL 2 uses virtualization technology to run a Linux kernel inside of a lightweight utility virtual machine (VM). Linux distributions run as isolated containers inside of the WSL 2 managed VM. Linux

Most transactional applications have a 70:30 RW profile. However, some special cases have extremely high write IO profiles.

I ran storage IO tests in the ap-southeast-2 (Sydney) AWS region to simulate IRIS database IO patterns and throughput similar to a very high write rate application.

The test aimed to determine whether the EC2 instance types and EBS volume types available in the AWS Australian regions will support the high IO rates and throughput required.

Minimal tuning was done in the operating system or IRIS (see Operating System and IRIS configuration below).

• The EC2 instance and EBS

ObjectScript is a powerful language used in InterSystems products like InterSystems IRIS, enabling developers to build robust applications. To enhance the ObjectScript development experience, the OwnObjectScriptExtension is a Visual Studio Code extension that provides a range of tools and features. In this article, we will explore how the OwnObjectScriptExtension can improve your ObjectScript development workflow.

Writing comprehensive method descriptions is essential for maintaining code clarity and promoting c

REST API for Security Package

Hi community,

In this article, we will learn how to set up a REST API for the IRIS Security Package. We will be able to create users, roles, add applications, etc... by simple HTTP requests as well as generate a client application in ObjectScript.

Requirements

We need :

1. An IRIS instance (installation kit or docker).
2. ObjectScript package manager (ZPM).
3. (Optional) A second IRIS instance to generate an ObjectScript client.

We will use a set of existing applications and libraries on OpenExchange. The package manager (ZPM) will make their installations much easier.

Hey Developers,

Watch this video to learn about observability of your InterSystems IRIS application with InterSystems System Alerting and Monitoring (SAM) and modern DevOps tooling:

⏯ Observability with InterSystems IRIS @ Global Summit 2022

@Jeff Fried 

Hi Jeff,

I reviewed the Ensemble 2018 support documentation
https://docs.intersystems.com/latest/csp/docbook/DocBook.UI.Page.cls?KE…

And I did not find a restriction on the use of Ensemble 2018 installed on Docker with Openshift, but I received information that Intersystems would not support this installation case. That is true?

This would help us with the transition to IRIS as I carry out the migrations.

Thank you very much for your help

I deployed the IRIS container on my Mac M1 Docker Desktop Kubernetes cluster:

I limited the container 1.5Gb memory:

In the "merge.cpf" file I constrained IRIS memory usage aspects:

Now I load-test the container by multiple installing  and uninstalling the %ZPM package:

• install ZPM (zpm-installer.routine and execution):

Released with no formal announcement in IRIS preview release 2019.4 is the /api/monitor service exposing IRIS metrics in Prometheus format. Big news for anyone wanting to use IRIS metrics as part of their monitoring and alerting solution. The API is a component of the new IRIS System Alerting and Monitoring (SAM) solution that will be released in an upcoming version of IRIS.

However, you do not have to wait for SAM to start planning and trialling this API to monitor your IRIS instances. In future posts, I will dig deeper into the metrics available and what they mean and provide example intera

Is there a way to do something like $SYSTEM.OBJ.ExportAllClassesIndividual() for the routines?

I'd like to export all routines in single files

Hi Developers,

Enjoy watching the new video on InterSystems Developers YouTube:

⏯ Real-World CI/CD: Keep Calm & Build On @ Global Summit 2022

Does anyone happen to have a sample Configuration (CPF) Merge file that includes Action parameters setting up authentication methods (e.g. Password, Kerberos) for certain Services and Web Applications (e.g. via the ModifyService or Modify/CreateApplication AutheEnabled property)?

Thanks!

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. Was the modification also consistently applied to Bac

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. My code repository can be found here

InterSystems IRIS container with vscode and pre-connected

Overview

This project creates an IRIS containe