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.

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.

UPDATE:  Developer Preview 7 has been released.

Update 7 includes a number of stability improvements over previous updates and support for support for all of the planned 2022.1 features.  If you notice any problems at all, now's the time to let us know.  The docker pull commands below have been updated with the latest build numbers.  Enjoy!

Developer Preview releases are now available for the 2022.1 version of InterSystems IRIS, IRIS for Health, and HealthShare Health Connect.

As this is InterSystems' first developer preview release, let's take a moment to describe what these are.  The developer preview program enhances the previous IRIS preview program with approximately bi-weekly releases that add features as they are ready.  This allows us to get feedback on capabilities and enhancements as they're available.  You'll see below a list of enhancements that are targeted for 2022.1, which are not included in the first developer preview.  Look for those over the coming weeks. 

We are eager to learn from your experiences with this new release ahead of its General Availability release. Please share your feedback through the Developer Community so we can build a better product together. 

InterSystems IRIS Data Platform 2022.1 is an extended maintenance (EM) release. 2022.1 includes the many important new capabilities and enhancements have been added in 2021.2, the continuous delivery (CD) release, since 2021.1, the previous EM release. Please refer to the release notes for 2021.2 for an overview of these enhancements.

Welcome to day 3 of Virtual Summit 2021!  We have incredible content available to you this year and I'd just like to bring your attention to the 4(!) sessions that we have on Embedded Python.

• Introduction to Embedded Python - What is Embedded Python and Why is it awesome
• Embedded Python for ObjectScript developers - A technical deep dive into using Python and ObjectScript together inside IRIS
• Embedded Python with Interoperability - Covers how to use Embedded Python to create your own custom interoperability components.

We’re looking for Python developers to participate in our Embedded Python Early Access Program!  If you (or someone you know) are a Python developer and are interested, please contact us via the email address below.

InterSystems is bringing the power and simplicity of Python to IRIS.  We’re hard at work integrating Python directly into the IRIS kernel, making it a full peer to ObjectScript.

Java Business Host is now retired

With the release of PEX in InterSystems IRIS 2020.1 and InterSystems IRIS for Health 2020.1, customers have a better way to build Java into productions than the Java Business Host. PEX provides a complete set of APIs for building interoperability components and is available in both Java and .NET.

The Java Business Host has been removed from InterSystems IRIS and InterSystems IRIS for Health as of their 2020.4 releases.  Customers using the Java Business Host are encouraged to migrate to PEX.

Using the Java Gateway to speed development

InterSystems IRIS includes dynamic object gateways for Java, .NET, and (now) Python.  These gateways allow your IRIS application to use libraries in these languages, removing the need to create everything from scratch in ObjectScript.

In this example, we use the iTextPdf and Apache PdfBox libraries to read a text file and produce a basic PDF from it.  These libraries are deep and rich PDF controls, so a little bit of development could produce an example application that produces far more compelling results for your needs.

Migrate from Java Business Host to PEX

With the release PEX in InterSystems IRIS 2020.1 and InterSystems IRIS for Health 2020.1, customers have a better way to build Java into productions than the Java Business Host. PEX provides a complete set of APIs for building interoperability components and is available in both Java and .NET. The Java Business Host has been deprecated and will be retired in a future release.

Advantages of PEX

• Allows developers to create any Production component in either Java or .