Benefits of InterSystems Cloud Manager

Benefits of InterSystems Cloud Manager

InterSystems Cloud Manager (ICM) provides you with a simple, intuitive way to provision cloud infrastructure and deploy services on it. ICM is designed to bring you the benefits of infrastructure as code (IaC), immutable infrastructure, and containerized deployment of your InterSystems IRIS-based applications, without requiring you to make major investments in new technology and the attendant training and trial-and-error configuration and management.

ICM makes it easy to provision and deploy the desired InterSystems IRIS configuration on Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) public cloud platforms, including Google Cloud Platform, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Tencent Cloud. Define what you want in plain text configuration files and use the simple command line interface to direct ICM; ICM does the rest, including provisioning your cloud infrastructure and deploying your InterSystems IRIS-based applications on that infrastructure in Docker containers.

ICM codifies APIs into declarative configuration files that can be shared among team members like code, edited, reviewed, and versioned. By executing the specifications in these files, ICM enables you to safely and predictably create, change, and improve production infrastructure on an ongoing basis.

Using ICM lets you take advantage of the efficiency, agility, and repeatability provided by virtual and cloud computing and containerized software without major development or retooling. The InterSystems IRIS configurations ICM can provision and deploy range from a stand-alone instance, through a distributed cache cluster of application servers connected to a data server, to a sharded cluster of data and compute nodes. ICM can deploy on existing virtual and physical clusters as well as infrastructure it provisions.

Even if you are already using cloud infrastructure, containers, or both, ICM dramatically reduces the time and effort required to provision and deploy your application by automating numerous manual steps based on the information you provide. And the functionality of ICM is easily extended through the use of third-party tools and in-house scripting, increasing automation and further reducing effort.

Each element of the ICM approach provides its own advantages, which combine with each other:

• Configuration file templates allow you to accept default values provided by InterSystems for most settings, customizing only those required to meet your specific needs.

• The command line interface allows you to initiate each phase of the provisioning and deployment process with a single simple command, and to interact with deployed containers in a wide variety of ways.

• IaC brings the ability to quickly provision consistent, repeatable platforms that are easily reproduced, managed, and disposed of.

• IaaS providers enable you to utilize infrastructure in the most efficient manner — for example, if you need a cloud configuration for only a few hours, you pay for only a few hours — while also supporting repeatability, and providing all the resources you need to go with your host nodes, such as networking and security, load balancers, and storage volumes.

• Containerized application deployment means seamlessly replaceable application environments on immutable software-provisioned infrastructure, separating code from data and avoiding the risks and costs of updating the infrastructure itself while supporting Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) and a DevOps approach.

  Containers Support the DevOps Approach
  

ICM exploits these advantages to bring you the following benefits:

• Automated provisioning and deployment, and command-line management, of large-scale, cloud-based InterSystems IRIS configurations.

• Integration of existing InterSystems IRIS and InterSystems IRIS-based applications into your enterprise’s DevOps toolchain.

• Stability, robustness, and minimization of risk through easy versioning of both the application and the environment it runs in.

• Elastic scaling of deployed InterSystems IRIS configurations through rapid reprovisioning and redeployment.

If you prefer not to work with Docker containers, you can use ICM to provision cloud infrastructure and install noncontainerized InterSystems IRIS instances on that infrastructure, or to install InterSystems IRIS on existing infrastructure. For more information about using ICM’s containerless mode, see the appendix Containerless Deployment.