The InterSystems Kubernetes Operator (IKO) automates the deployment of InterSystems IRIS® topologies on any Kubernetes platform. It extends the Kubernetes API with the IrisCluster custom resource, which can be deployed as an InterSystems IRIS sharded cluster, distributed cache cluster, or standalone instance (all optionally mirrored) on any Kubernetes platform. The IKO also adds InterSystems IRIS-specific cluster management capabilities to Kubernetes, enabling automation of tasks like adding nodes to a cluster, which you would otherwise have to do manually by interacting directly with the instances.
Here is an option for your headspace if you are designing an multi-cluster architecture and the Operator is an FTE to the design. You can run the Operator from a central Kubernetes cluster (A), and point it to another Kubernetes cluster (B), so that when the apply an IrisCluster to B the Operator works remotely on A and plans the cluster accordingly on B. This design keeps some resource heat off the actual workload cluster, spares us some serviceaccounts/rbac and gives us only one operator deployment to worry about so we can concentrate on the IRIS workloads.
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.
"Haul" a Portable Registry for Airgapped IrisClusters
Rancher Government Hauler streamlines deploying and maintaining InterSystems container workloads in air-gapped environments by simplifying how you package and move required assets. It treats container images, Helm charts, and other files as content and collections, letting you fetch, store, and distribute them declaratively or via CLI — without changing your existing workflows. Meaning your charts and what have yous, can have conditionals on your pull locations in Helm values, etc.
If you have been tracking how HealthShare is being deployed via IPM Packages, you can certainly appreciate the adoption of OCI compliance storage for the packages themselves using ORAS... which is core to the Hauler solution.
KWOK, Kubernetes WithOut Kubelet, is a lightweight tool that simulates nodes and pods—without running real workloads—so you can quickly test and scale IrisCluster behavior, scheduling, and zone assignment. For those of you wondering what value is in this without the IRIS workload, you will quickly realize it when you play with your Desk Toys awaiting nodes and pods to come up or get the bill for provisioning expensive disk behind the pvc's for no other reason than just to validate your topology.
Here we will use it to simulate an IrisCluster and target a topology across 4 zones, implementing high availability mirroring across zones, disaster recovery to an alternate zone, and horizontal ephemeral compute (ecp) to a zone of its own. All of this done locally, suitable for repeatable testing, and a valuable validation check mark on the road to production.
For a variety of reasons, users may wish to mount a persistent volume on two or more pods spanning multiple availability zones. One such use case is to make data stored outside of IRIS available to both mirror members in case of failover.
Unfortunately the built-in storage classes in most Kubernetes implementations (whether cloud or on-prem) do not provide this capability:
A step by step implementation path to a cross regional stretched IrisCluster with Mirroring using the Intersystems Kubernetes Operator (IKO), Google Cloud Platform, and Tailscale.
I am giving this distraction the code name "Compliment Sandwich" for a reason yet to be realized, but I'd rather the community go right for the jugular shooting holes in a solution that implements wireguard based connectivity for our workloads in general, as I would like to refine it as a fall project leading up to KubeCon in Atlanta and if I miss the mark, Ill get it done before Amsterdam.
Another step in this implementation path, adding cross cloud, cross regional stretched IrisCluster with Mirroring + Disaster Recovery using the Intersystems Kubernetes Operator (IKO) and Tailscale
Though trivial, Id like to go multi-cloud with the stretched IrisCluster for a couple of reasons to socialize the power of Wireguard when it supplies the network for a properly zoned IrisCluster by adding another mirror role to Amazon Web Services in the Western United States based datacenter in Oregon.
For a variety of reasons, users may wish to mount a persistent volume on two or more pods spanning multiple availability zones. One such use case is to make data stored outside of IRIS available to both mirror members in case of failover.
Unfortunately the built-in storage classes in most Kubernetes implementations (whether cloud or on-prem) do not provide this capability:
For a variety of reasons, users may wish to mount a persistent volume on two or more pods spanning multiple availability zones. One such use case is to make data stored outside of IRIS available to both mirror members in case of failover.
Unfortunately the built-in storage classes in most Kubernetes implementations (whether cloud or on-prem) do not provide this capability:
Kubernetes horizontal pod auto-scaling (HPA) is the key to handle the unpredictable compute workload in healthcare systems. IKO helps orchestrating the IRIS container deployment in Kubernetes including the capability to configure HPA. This demo uses XSLT processing as an example to showcase this type of elasticity.
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InterSystems Kubernetes Operator (IKO) 3.8 is now Generally Available. IKO 3.8 adds new functionality along with numerous bug fixes and security updates. Highlights include:
The IKO allows for sidecars. The idea behind them is to have direct access to a specific instance of IRIS. If we have mirrored data nodes, the web gateway will (correctly) only give us access to the primary node. But perhaps we need access to a specific instance. The sidecar is the solution.
Building on the example from the previous article, we introduce the sidecar by using a mirrored data node and of course arbiter.
Below we define the environment we will be creating via a Custom Resource Definition (CRD). It lets us define something outside the realm of what the Kubernetes standard knows (this is objects such as your pods, services, persistent volumes (and claims), configmaps, secrets, and lots more). We are building a new kind of object, an IrisCluster object.
The IKO documentation is robust. A single web page, that consists of about 50 actual pages of documentation. For beginners that can be a bit overwhelming. As the saying goes: how do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. Let's start with the first bite: helm.
What is Helm?
Helm is to Kubernetes what the InterSystems Package Manager (IPM, formerly ObjectScript Package Manager - ZPM) is to IRIS.
This article will cover turning over control of provisioning the InterSystems Kubernetes Operator, and starting your journey managing your own "Cloud" of InterSystems Solutions through Git Ops practices. This deployment pattern is also the fulfillment path for the PID^TOO||| FHIR Breathing Identity Resolution Engine.
I'm trying to learn how to use the IKO for deploying solutions to Kubernetes. In my current project I'm trying to deploy the IAM onto a K8S context. Are there directly usable samples of the yaml file I need to use for that?
InterSystems Kubernetes Operator (IKO) 3.5 is now Generally Available. IKO 3.5 adds significant new functionality along with numerous bug fixes. Highlights include:
This week I was able to demo a proof of concept for our FMS interface on traffic cop architecture to my team. We are working on modernizing an Interoperability production running on mirrored Health Connect instances. We deploy IRIS workloads on Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform using InterSystems Kubernetes Operator (IKO). We can define any number of replicas for the compute stateful set where each compute pod runs our Interoperability production. We introduced Horizontal Pod Autoscaler (HPA) to scale up the number of compute pods based on memory or CPU utilization.
My team works on implementing an Interoperability solution utilizing InterSystems Kubernetes Operator on Red Hat OpenShift container platform.
We are trying to determine how many messages we can process in any given time. We have a Feeder app running in 10 containers sending 50k messages each to a load balancer all beginning at the same time.
Messages are received via HTTPS protocol by webgateway containers.
Interoperability production runs in compute pods with persistent data, journals, and WIJ volumes.
I work on deploying IRIS using Kubernetes operator and Red Hat OpenShift. I encouraged another team working on Java application to consider using IRIS as database. My team deployed IRIS cluster using two mirrored data pods for the other team. The other team asked me for the connection information.
To learn how to use Java with IRIS, I attempted to deploy two apps from Open Exchange:
The InterSystems Kubernetes Operation (IKO) version 3.3 is now available via the WRC download page and the InterSystems Container Registry.
IKO simplifies working with InterSystems IRIS or InterSystems IRIS for Health in Kubernetes by providing an easy-to-use irisCluster resource definition. See the documentation for a full list of features, including easy sharding, mirroring, and configuration of ECP.
IKO 3.3 Highlights:
Support for 2021.2 and 2022.1 editions of InterSystems IRIS & IRIS for Health
Support for Kuberentes 1.21
Deploy common System Alerting and Monitoring (SAM) configurations as part of your irisCluster
InterSystems API Manager (IAM) can now also be deployed and managed as part of the irisCluster
Automatic tagging of mirror pair active side, so a service can always point to the active mirror member.
Watch as the presenter uses IKO to deploy the WebGateway, SAM, and InterSystems API Manager with the latest version of the InterSystems Kubernetes Operator:
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Episode 20 of Data Points features a conversation with Bob Kuszewski about the Kubernetes and the InterSystems Kubernetes Operator (IKO). Take a listen to hear about some of the use cases and features of IKO, plus how it compares to InterSystems Cloud Manager (ICM) within the cloud space.
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If you're looking for an introduction to Kubernetes as a technology, and a little teaser about the InterSystems Kubernetes Operator, check out the recently released Kubernetes Overview video. This video will introduce you to the functionality and use cases of Kubernetes, and explain a bit about how the InterSystems Kubernetes Operator makes it beneficial to use Kubernetes with InterSystems IRIS.
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In the context of IKO (Iris Kubernetes Operator) the question of Service not redirecting dynamically to the correct Pod is still pending. In production this can be dangerous since an overload (or any other simpler problem) can cause you to change the main Pod and leave the application inoperable until we intervene.
Intersystems support warned that this is still an issue of IKO, but there are some possibilities that I am studying.
To explore an idea I had, I would like the help of this Forum to answer the following question:
In theprevious article, we looked at one way to create a custom operator that manages the IRIS instance state. This time, we’re going to take a look at a ready-to-go operator, InterSystems Kubernetes Operator (IKO).Official documentation will help us navigate the deployment steps.
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