High availability (HA) refers to the goal of keeping a system or application operational and available to users a very high percentage of the time, minimizing both planned and unplanned downtime.
Are you familiar with SQL databases, but not familiar with IRIS? Then read on...
About a year ago I joined InterSystems, and that is how IRIS got on my radar. I've been using databases for over 40 years—much of that time for database vendors—and assumed IRIS would be largely the same as the other databases I knew.
Some time ago, I put together a small example to quickly deploy InterSystems IRIS instances connected via ECP using Docker.
Time passed and, like everything, it needed a bit of a refresh.
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If you're running IRIS in a mirrored IrisCluster for HA in Kubernetes, the question of providing a Mirror VIP (Virtual IP) becomes relevant. Virtual IP offers a way for downstream systems to interact with IRIS using one IP address. Even when a failover happens, downstream systems can reconnect to the same IP address and continue working.
The lead in above was stolen (gaffled, jacked, pilfered) from techniques shared to the community for vips across public clouds with IRIS by @Eduard Lebedyuk ...
Articles: ☁ vip-aws | vip-gcp | vip-azure
This version strives to solve the same challenges for IRIS on Kubernetes when being deployed via MAAS, on prem, and possibly yet to be realized using cloud mechanics with Manged Kubernetes Services.
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If you are in the business of building a robust High Availability, Disaster Recovery or Stamping multiple environments rapidly and in a consistent manner Karmada may just be the engine powering your Cloning Facility..png)
One of the recommendations when deploying InterSystems Technologies for production is to set up High Availability. The recommended API Manager for these InterSystems Technologies is the InterSystems API Manager (IAM). IAM (essentially Kong Gateway) has multiple deployment topologies.
If you are looking for high availability you could use:
a) Kong Traditional Mode: Multiple Node Clusters
b) Hybrid Mode
c) DB-less Mode
Before we break them down let's first understand the out of the box deployment that is provided by InterSystems: Installing IAM Version 3.10.
Regardless of whether an instance of IRIS is in the cloud or not, high availability and disaster recovery are always important considerations. While IKO already allows for the use of NodeSelectors to enforce the scheduling of IRISCluster nodes across multiple zones, multi-region k8s clusters are generally not recommended or even supported in the major CSP's managed Kubernetes solutions. However, when discussing HA and DR for IRIS, we may want to have an async member in a completely separate region, or even in a different cloud provider altogether.