#DevOps

In an earlier article (hope, you’ve read it), we took a look at the CircleCI deployment system, which integrates perfectly with GitHub. Why then would we want to look any further? Well, GitHub has its own CI/CD platform called GitHub Actions, which is worth exploring. With GitHub Actions, you don’t need to rely on some external, albeit cool, service.

In this article we’re going to try using GitHub Actions to deploy the server part of  InterSystems Package Manager, ZPM-registry, on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE).

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: 3.713.

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!

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).

Imagine you want to see what InterSystems can give you in terms of data analytics. You studied the theory and now you want some practice. Fortunately, InterSystems provides a project that contains some good examples: Samples BI. Start with the README file, skipping anything associated with Docker, and go straight to the step-by-step installation. Launch a virtual instance, install IRIS there, follow the instructions for installing Samples BI, and then impress the boss with beautiful charts and tables. So far so good. 

Inevitably, though, you’ll need to make changes.

Most of us are more or less familiar with Docker. Those who use it like it for the way it lets us easily deploy almost any application, play with it, break something and then restore the application with a simple restart of the Docker container.
InterSystems also likes Docker. The InterSystems OpenExchange project contains a number of examples that run InterSystems IRIS images in Docker containers that are easy to download and run. You’ll also find other useful components, such as the Visual Studio IRIS plugin.

Hi Community,

Please welcome the new video on InterSystems Developers YouTube:

⏯ Automating InterSystems IRIS Instances Configuration

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.

Hi All,

With this article, I would like to show you how easily and dynamically System Alerting and Monitoring (or SAM for short) can be configured. The use case could be that of a fast and agile CI/CD provisioning pipeline where you want to run your unit-tests but also stress-tests and you would want to quickly be able to see if those tests are successful or how they are stressing the systems and your application (the InterSystems IRIS backend SAM API is extendable for your APM implementation). 

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.

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.

Last time we deployed a simple IRIS application to the Google Cloud. Now we’re going to deploy the same project to Amazon Web Services using its Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS).

We assume you’ve already forked the IRIS project to your own private repository. It’s called <username>/my-objectscript-rest-docker-template in this article. <root_repo_dir> is its root directory.

Before getting started, install the AWS command-line interface and, for Kubernetes cluster creation, eksctl, a simple CLI utility. For AWS you can try to use aws2, but you’ll need to set aws2 usage in kube config file as described here.

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. 

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.

Trying to modernize tasks I have to do on cache like change global variables on different servers, different namespaces....

Actually, I have a bash script  doing ssh on each server and running bash  script on each server like this

echo "zn \"namespace\"
s ^Var=1
"|csession ensapp

But this is not clean/modular/. I was thinking about using Ansible - as it is exactly what I need to do all the git pull. But I am not sure how to interact with cache. A shell ansible module - no way as it does not manage state.

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

Hi Community,

Please welcome the new video on InterSystems Developers YouTube:

⏯ Extending Interoperability with PEX & Containers

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.

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.

Hey Developers,

Please welcome the new session recording from the InterSystems AI+ML Summit 2021:

⏯ AI+ML Summit Convergent Analytics – Cross-Industry Stream

Hi Community,

Enjoy watching the new session recording from the InterSystems AI+ML Summit 2021:

⏯ AI+ML Summit Convergent Analytics – Healthcare Stream

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 input?

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.

I am just recently announced my project isc-tar. But sometimes it is not less interesting what’s behind the scene: how it was built, how it works and what happens around the project. Here is the story:

• How to develop this project
• How to test it
• How to release new versions for publishing
• And finally how to automate all above
• Continuous integration

So, I would like to tell all about it.

Flyway is a open source product used to develop database code to migration, ddl version control, automate database procedures, etc. It is the most used product to do DevOps automation procedures to database. Do you consider create iris support to flyway?

https://flywaydb.org/documentation/contribute/contributingDatabaseSupport

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).

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.

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:

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.