Maintenance Releases 2022.1.5 & 2023.1.4 of InterSystems IRIS, IRIS for Health, & HealthShare HealthConnect are now available

Two extended maintenance releases of InterSystems IRIS, InterSystems IRIS for Health, and HealthShare Health Connect are now available.

✅ 2022.1.5

Release 2022.1.5 provides bug fixes for any of the previous 2022.1.x releases.

You can find the detailed change lists & upgrade checklists on these pages:

• InterSystems IRIS
• InterSystems IRIS for Health
• HealthShare Health Connect

✅ 2023.1.4

Release 2023.1.4 provides bug fixes for any of the previous 2023.1.x releases.

The first developer preview of InterSystems IRIS 2024.2 and InterSystems IRIS for Health 2024.2 has been posted to the WRC developer preview site.  Containers are not available for this preview, but we’ll be sure to post them next time.

This is the earliest in the release cycle that we’ve ever posted a developer preview and there aren’t any “highlight” worthy features that are complete.  I’ll list them as they get closer to done in future preview releases.

Initial documentation can be found at these links below.

Welcome to the first quarterly platform update of 2024.  If you’re new to these updates, welcome!  This update aims to share recent changes as well as our best current knowledge on upcoming changes, but predicting the future is tricky business and this shouldn’t be considered a committed roadmap. 

With that said, on to the update…

InterSystems IRIS Production Operating Systems and CPU Architectures

Minimum Supported CPU Models

As a reminder, we announced that InterSystems IRIS will start to have minimum required CPU functionality for Intel/AMD-based systems starting with IRIS 2024.

InterSystems Kubernetes Operator (IKO) 3.7 is now Generally Available.  IKO 3.7 adds significant new functionality along with numerous bug fixes.  Highlights include:

• When using IKO 3.7 with IRIS 2024.1+, the WebGateway can authenticate to IRIS via mutual TLS.
• Support for reporting asynchronous mirror members
• Resource requests can now be applied to IAM pods
• Improvements to iriscluster resource output

Follow the Installation Guide for guidance on how to download, install, and get started with IKO.  The complete IKO 3.7 documentation

IAM 3.4 Release

InterSystems API Manager (IAM) version 3.4.2 is now Generally Available.  In additional to bug fixes and minor improvements IAM 3.4 includes several features that might be of interest to IRIS customers.

Embedded Python is about to get a whole lot more powerful, and we’re looking for a few volunteers to give it a try.

What’s the Flexible Python Runtime?

The Flexible Python Runtime option allows you to use a Python runtime of your choosing with Embedded Python. Previous to this, you could only use the operating system's default Python, which was limiting especially for customers using the latest and greatest AI & ML tools close to their data.

When InterSystems introduced Embedded Python in InterSystems IRIS in 2021.

It’s hard to believe that this wraps up our first year of quarterly platform updates.  Thank you for making this a great first year.  Today’s update talks about the planned Minimum Supported CPU list, OpenSSL 3.0 for AIX reaching GA, and a bit more.  We’ll be back for 2024!

This update aims to share recent changes as well as our best current knowledge on upcoming changes, but predicting the future is tricky business and this shouldn’t be considered a committed roadmap.

InterSystems has decided to stop further development of SAM (System Alerting & Monitoring) and label it as deprecated as of today.  InterSystems will continue to support existing customers using the technology, but it is no longer recommended for new deployments.

We’ve found that most customers who are interested in the type of observability provided by SAM have chosen to connect IRIS’s metrics API & structured logs to their organization’s existing observability platform in order to have a more complete view of their operational platform.

When AMD published the x86-64 standard in 1999, little did they know they were inventing what would become the de-facto architecture for server CPUs.  But the CPUs of today aren’t the same as ones produced 20 years back – as they have extensions for everything from Advanced Vector Extensions (AVX) to Hardware-Assisted Virtualization (VT-d).

InterSystems would like to take better advantage of these new extensions in upcoming versions of InterSystems IRIS.  While our compilers are smart enough to create optimized code for many situations, some optimizations can only be turned on by explicitly cutting off support for processors that do not have that instruction set. Additionally, we are finding it increasingly difficult to maintain older CPU models to test on.

Introduction

InterSystems would like to optimize IRIS to take advantage of modern CPU instruction set extensions.  That’s great for product performance, but how do you know if your CPU will still be supported for new IRIS builds?  Here’s how to know your CPU’s microarchitecture family as well as how to find out your CPU’s specific instruction set extensions.

InterSystems will end support for using the VxFS filesystem with InterSystems IRIS and label it as deprecated as of the release of InterSystems IRIS 2023.3.  InterSystems will continue to support any existing customers using the technology, but it is no longer recommended for new deployments.

VxFS had only been supported on SUSE Linux.  Impacted customers are encouraged to migrate to XFS or another supported filesystem.

Customers with questions should reach out to their account team or contact me directly.

End of support for CentOS

CentOS will no longer be a supported development platform as of the release of InterSystems IRIS 2023.3. 

CentOS had been a supported development platform to give developers a free-to-use equivalent to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) for IRIS development.  As you're probably aware, Red Hat made significant changes to CentOS which moved it to being “upstream” of RHEL. This means it has bugs & features not yet included in RHEL, which can cause problems for developers building on the platform.

InterSystems has made the decision to stop further development of the InterSystems Cloud Manager and label it as deprecated as of the InterSystems IRIS 2023.3 release.  InterSystems will continue to support existing customers using the technology, but it is no longer recommended for new deployments.

Customers in the cloud who are interested in deploying and managing an IRIS deployment with many systems are encouraged to consider Kubernetes and the InterSystems Kubernetes Operator, which has very similar functionality to ICM.

Red Hat Insights alerts now available for InterSystems IRIS

InterSystems and Red Hat are working together to add IRIS-specific alerts to Red Hat Insights. 

Red Hat Insights is a service to predict and recommend remediations for system risks in Red Hat Enterprise Linux environments.  Insights is free with nearly every RHEL, OpenShift, or Ansible subscription.  You can learn more about Insights at Red Hat’s site.

Swappiness Recommendation

The first recommendation “Apply swappiness recommendation for better performance of InterSystems IRIS” has been activated.

We often get questions about recent and upcoming changes to the list of platforms and frameworks that are supported by the InterSystems IRIS data platform.  This update aims to share recent changes as well as our best current knowledge on upcoming changes, but predicting the future is tricky business and this shouldn’t be considered a committed roadmap. 

With that said, on to the update…

IRIS Production Operating Systems and CPU Architectures

Red Hat Enterprise Linux

• Recent Changes
  
  • RHEL 9.2 & RHEL 8.8 were released in May, 2023. Red Hat is planning to support these releases for 4 years.

InterSystems Kubernetes Operator (IKO) 3.6 is now Generally Available.  IKO 3.6 adds significant new functionality along with numerous bug fixes.  Highlights include:

• Easily include Web Gateway sidecars for compute and data nodes.

When IRIS 2023.2 reaches general availability, we’ll be making some improvements to how we tag and distribute IRIS & IRIS for Health containers.

IRIS containers have been tagged using the full build number format, for example 2023.1.0.235.1.  Customers have been asking for more stable tags, so they don’t need to change their dockerfiles/Kubernetes files every time a new release is made.  With that in mind, we’re making the following changes to how we tag container images.

Major.Minor Tags:  Containers will be tagged with the year and release, but not the rest of the full build number.

We often get questions about recent and upcoming changes to the list of platforms and frameworks that are supported by the InterSystems IRIS data platform.  This update aims to share recent changes as well as our best current knowledge on upcoming changes, but predicting the future is tricky business and this shouldn’t be considered a committed roadmap. 

With that said, on to the update…

InterSystems Kubernetes Operator (IKO) 3.5 is now Generally Available.  IKO 3.5 adds significant new functionality along with numerous bug fixes.  Highlights include:

• Simplified setup of TLS across the Web Gateway, ECP, Mirroring, Super Server, and IAM
• The ability to run container sidecars along with compute or data nodes – perfect for scaling web gateways with your compute nodes.
• Changes to the CPF configmap and IRIS key secret are automatically processed by the IRIS instances when using IKO 3.5 with IRIS 2023.1 and up.

IAM 3.2 Release

InterSystems API Manager (IAM) version 3.2.1 is now Generally Available.  In additional to bug fixes and minor improvements IAM 3.2 adds new plug-ins that might be of interest to IRIS customers.

• OAS Validation (oas-validation)
  
  • Validate HTTP requests and responses based on an OpenAPI 3.0 or Swagger API Specification.
• SAML (saml)
  
  • Provides SAML v2.0 authentication and authorization between a service provider (Kong Gateway) and an identity provider (IdP).
• XML Threat Protection (xml-threat-protection)
  
  • This new plugin allows you to reduce the risk of XML attacks by checking the structure of XML payloads. This validates maximum complexity (depth of the tree), maximum size of elements and attributes.
• AppDynamics (app-dynamics)
  
  • Integrate Kong Gateway with the AppDynamics APM Platform.
• JWE Decrypt (jwe-decrypt)
  
  • Allows you to decrypt an inbound token (JWE) in a request.

InterSystems Supported Platforms Update Feb-2023

Welcome to the very first Supported Platforms Update!  We often get questions about recent and upcoming changes to the list of platforms and frameworks that are supported by the InterSystems IRIS data platform.  This update aims to share recent changes as well as our best current knowledge on upcoming changes, but predicting the future is tricky business and this shouldn’t be considered a committed roadmap.

We’re planning to publish this kind of update approximately every 3 months and then re-evaluate in a year.  If you find this update useful, let us know!  We’d also appreciate suggestions for how to make it better.

With that said, on to the update…

We've added a new channel to the Developer Community Discord Server, #platforms.  This is a good place to discuss issues related to Operating Systems, CPU architectures, and Containers supported by InterSystems products.

To kick things off, let's talk CentOS.

CentOS has been supported to give developers a free-to-use equivalent to Red Hat Enterprise Linux for IRIS development.  As you're probably aware, Red Hat made significant changes to CentOS which have resulted in it being significantly less stable than RHEL.

IAM 3.0 Release

InterSystems API Manager (IAM) version 3.0.2 is now Generally Available.  IAM 3.

Announcing the InterSystems Container Registry web user interface

InterSystems is pleased to announce the release of the InterSystems Container Registry web user interface. This tool is designed to make it easier to discover, access, and use the many Container images hosted on ICR.

The InterSystems Container Registry UI is available at: https://containers.intersystems.com/contents

Community Edition Containers

When you visit the ICR user interface, you’ll have access to InterSystems' publicly available containers, including the IRIS community edition containers.

InterSystems is pleased to announce the release of System Alerting & Monitoring (SAM) version 2.0.

What is SAM?

SAM marries IRIS’s standards-based Monitoring API and Log Monitor with familiar industry standard tools like Grafana and Prometheus to create a basic monitoring and alerting solution for IRIS clusters.

For more on SAM, see the System Alerting and Monitoring Guide.

What’s new in SAM 2.0?

The industry standard tools that SAM relies on have all been upgraded. 

Configuration Export & Import – You can now export your SAM configuration and re-import it into another SAM instance.

IAM 2.8.1 Release

InterSystems API Manager (IAM) version 2.8.1 is now Generally Available.  In addition to a spade of performance improvements and bug fixes, this release adds significant new functionality, including:

• Core
  
  • Consumer Groups - Lets you group together consumers to create service tiers
  • Event Hooks - Enables IAM to call a web hook when certain events occur. For example, send a PagerDuty message if an endpoint fails.
  • Improvements to Hybrid Mode - Relaxed version checking; control plane can continue to work if the database is down.

InterSystems is pleased to announce the release System Alerting & Monitoring (SAM) version 1.1.

What is SAM?

SAM marries IRIS’s standards-based Monitoring API and Log Monitor with familiar industry standard tools like Grafana and Prometheus to create a basic monitoring and alerting solution for IRIS clusters.

For more on SAM, see the System Alerting and Monitoring Guide.

What’s new in SAM 1.1?

You’ll notice performance improvements for the Grafana dashboard graphs, especially when working with large data sets.  If you’re upgrading from SAM 1.

Docker 20.10.14 (released March 23, 2022) changes the Linux capabilities given to containers in a manner that is incompatible with the Linux capability checker in InterSystems IRIS 2021.1 (and up) containers. 

Users running Docker 20.10.14 on Linux will find that IRIS 2021.1+ containers will fail to start and the logs will incorrectly report that required Linux capabilities are missing.  For example:

[ERROR] Required Linux capability cap_setuid is missing.
[ERROR] Required Linux capability cap_dac_override is missing.
[ERROR] Required Linux capability cap_fowner is missing.
[ERROR] Required Linux capability cap_setgid is missing. 
[ERROR] Required Linux capability cap_kill is missing.
[FATAL] Your IRIS container is missing one or more required Linux capabilities.

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.