As an IT and cloud team manager with 18 years of experience with InterSystems technologies, I recently led our team in the transformation of our traditional on-premises ERP system to a cloud-based solution. We embarked on deploying InterSystems IRIS within a Kubernetes environment on AWS EKS, aiming to achieve a scalable, performant, and secure system. Central to this endeavor was the utilization of the AWS Application Load Balancer (ALB) as our ingress controller.

You may have noticed that to configure a mirror for InterSystems IRIS for Health™ and HealthShare® Health Connect there is a special requirement. I wanted to go through it step by step in this article.

In this article, we’ll build a highly available IRIS configuration using Kubernetes Deployments with distributed persistent storage instead of the “traditional” IRIS mirror pair. This deployment would be able to tolerate infrastructure-related failures, such as node, storage and Availability Zone failures. The described approach greatly reduces the complexity of the deployment at the expense of slightly extended RTO.

A common need for our customers is to configure both HealthShare HealthConnect and IRIS in high availability mode.

It's common for other integration engines on the market to be advertised as having "high availability" configurations, but that's not really true. In general, these solutions work with external databases and therefore, if these are not configured in high availability, when a database crash occurs or the connection to it is lost, the entire integration tool it becomes unusable.

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.

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 .

I have been working on redesigning a Health Connect production which runs on a mirrored instance of Healthshare 2019. We were told to take advantage of containers. We got to work on IRIS 2020.1 and split the database part from the Interoperability part. We had the IRIS mirror running on EC2 instances and used containers to run IRIS interoperability application. Eventually we decided to run the data tier in containers as well.

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.

++ Update: August 1, 2018

The use of the InterSystems Virtual IP (VIP) address built-in to Caché database mirroring has certain limitations. In particular, it can only be used when mirror members reside the same network subnet. When multiple data centers are used, network subnets are not often “stretched” beyond the physical data center due to added network complexity (more detailed discussion here). For similar reasons, Virtual IP is often not usable when the database is hosted in the cloud.

Network traffic management appliances such as load balancers (physical or virtual) can be used to achieve the same level of transparency, presenting a single address to the client applications or devices. The network traffic manager automatically redirects clients to the current mirror primary’s real IP address. The automation is intended to meet the needs of both HA failover and DR promotion following a disaster.

Presenters: Pete Greskoff, Sebastian Musielak
Task: Ensure high availability of your HealthShare deployments
Approach: Discuss high-availability options and focus on HealthShare’s new support for database mirroring

With the new release of HealthShare, Mirroring is now support for high availability. This session will describe high availability options and focus on mirroring your HealthShare deployments.

Content related to this session, including slides, video and additional learning content can be found here.

Presenter: Mark Bolinsky
Task: Decide whether a converged infrastructure is ideal for your enterprise applications
Approach: Discuss best practices and provide guidance on the right questions to ask

The traditional use of “SAN storage” is no longer the only choice for deploying enterprise application. Software defined data centers are making inroads into enterprise data centers, and there is good reason for it. There is the potential for significant infrastructure cost savings, architecture simplification, reduced administration costs, and depending on the configuration - even better performance. This session will discuss some best practices and outline decision guidance to help you ask the right questions when considering hyper-converged architectures.

Content related to this session, including slides, video and additional learning content can be found here.