New post

#DevOps

7

Software engineering practice that aims at unifying software development (Dev) and software operation (Ops).

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.

10 2
4 121
Article
· Dec 3, 2025 28m read
Security in IRIS

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.

6 0
3 205

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.

5 3
1 425

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.

Open Exchange app
11 3
2 350

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.<--break->

0 3
0 171

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.

9 1
3 258

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.

Open Exchange app
8 0
2 332

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.

Open Exchange app
4 3
0 246

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

0 0
0 170

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.

3 0
1 410

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**.

2 0
1 469

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.

5 0
0 1.7K

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

https://www.youtube.com/embed/pJUm5GABMXU
[This is an embedded link, but you cannot view embedded content directly on the site because you have declined the cookies necessary to access it. To view embedded content, you would need to accept all cookies in your Cookies Settings]

3 0
0 257

@Jeff Fried

Hi Jeff,

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

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?

0 1
0 272

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.

11 2
7 2.2K

Hi Developers,

Enjoy watching the new video on InterSystems Developers YouTube:

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

https://www.youtube.com/embed/EcaJETVJ6eg
[This is an embedded link, but you cannot view embedded content directly on the site because you have declined the cookies necessary to access it. To view embedded content, you would need to accept all cookies in your Cookies Settings]

1 0
1 457

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.

Open Exchange app
3 2
0 525

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

11 5
0 1K