Deploy InterSystems IRIS Community Edition on the Cloud

Deploy InterSystems IRIS Community Edition on the cloud for free with AWS or Azure!

The Community Edition of InterSystems IRIS is designed for evaluation and demonstration purposes and as such, comes with certain limitations. For more information on the community and its limition, see the relevant documentation page.

The marketplace links for these are:

• Amazon Web Services (AWS)
  
  • InterSystems IRIS Community
  • InterSystems IRIS For Health Community
• Microsoft Azure
  
  • InterSystems IRIS Community
  • InterSystems IRIS For Health Community

Please be aware, while we endeavor to keep the walkthroughs on this page up-to-date, some of the settings or buttons may be in a different place or appear slightly different from how they are shown in this guide.

This guide will walk you through how to deploy an instance of InterSystems IRIS Community Edition on the Cloud for free, you only have to pay for compute.

If you have not previously used AWS, you can even sign up for a Free Tier Account which provides $100 free credits to evaluate, and automatically shuts off to prevent charges. Through this you can get started running InterSystems IRIS Community Edition on the cloud completely free.

Note the instructions below are the same for InterSystems IRIS Community Edition and InterSystems IRIS for Health Community Edition (link above).

Once signed in to AWS go to InterSystems IRIS Community Edition on the AWS Marketplace

On the marketplace page, click View Purchase Options to see the "Subscribe to InterSystems IRIS Community Edition page". This page includes Terms and Conditions, along with pricing details, which shows the Total amount as $0.00.

Scroll to the bottom of the page and click Subscribe:

It might take a minute to process the Subscription. Afterwards the subscription page will reload including a banner saying you have already subscribed and a button saying Launch your software. Note, the exact placement of this button on the page varies. Click Launch your software.

From this page, you can then chose how you would like to launch your instance. It's recommended to use the `EC2 Launch Console`. Select this from the Launch Method and then click Launch from EC2

The EC2 Launch console is where you define the settings for the Instance you are launching. You may wish to explore these settings in more detail yourself, but this guide will describe some of the core settings.

These are used to recognize and identify the Instance. Organized naming and tagging is especially important if you are managing multiple AWS instances.

This is where you select the virtual machine being run. If you have clicked through the InterSystems IRIS Community Edition marketplace page, you should have the correct Amazon Machine Image (AMI) already selected. Otherwise, you can select it from the catalog.

Choose the hardware that InterSystems IRIS Community Edition will be running on. If you are on the free tier, you will be limited to small machines here. Choose your machine based on both workload size and budget, as more powerful machines will come at an increased cost.

The Key pair is the login key which you can use to connect to the instance via a Secure Shell connection (SSH). If you do not decide a Key pair here, you will not be able to log in via SSH.
Then, create a Key pair, this allows secure SSH logins, this will download a Private Key which you can use to login.

Unless you have previously created a Key pair you will need to generate a new one. For this, click `Create new key pair`, and in the pop-up choose a key name (to identify it), an encryption method and a file format (if you are uncertain about these, leave them as defaults). Click

Here you can define some Network Security settings, like limiting which IP addresses can connect to your instance and allowing HTTP/HTTPS Traffic. Depending on your use case and security concerns, the appropriate settings will vary, so consider the required settings for your desired use.

Choose the amount of storage needed for your instance. Note, the InterSystems IRIS Community Edition limits database storage to 10GB, so significantly more than this is unlikely to be required.

There are a large number of additional settings available, including the ability to upload user data from the launch portal. These can be ignored for basic usage.

After selecting your settings, click "Launch Instance" from the "Summary" panel on the right-hand side of the page.

You instance will take a bit of time to launch and do appropriate status tests, but after that will be available online.

From the Instance Dashboard you can find the Public DNS, which is the address used to connect to the instance with SSH or as a web-server.

Once you've started you instance, you can navigate to the instance summary by selecting the ID within the success message or navigating to the "Instances" dashboard from the left-hand panel.

From the Instance Summary you can find the `Public IPv4 address` and `Public DNS`, either of which can be used to connect to the instance with SSH or as a web-server. The Public DNS is a redirect that routes to the IP address, so each option has the same result.

You can connect to the instance in different ways, some of which are described below.

Whichever connection method you use, you will need to reset the password the first time you connect. The default credentials are:

- Username: _SYSTEM
- Password: SYS

If you are connecting from a command-line interface, change the password with:

iris password

and start an IRIS terminal with:

iris session iris

There is a large button within the instance summary to "Connect" (see screenshot above). Click this to open the connection portal. The first tab of this is the EC2 Instance Connect tab. You can leave the defaults in place and click `Connect`. This will open a new terminal window.

You can connect using SSH, using the Private key downloaded earlier and either the IP or DNS addresses listed under the instance summary. Please note, when connecting to your InterSystems IRIS instance using SSH, you need to use the username `ubuntu`.

# Run to ensure key is not publically viewable
chmod 400 "My-Key-Pair.pem"

# Connect to instance using DNS
ssh -i "My-Key-Pair.pem" ubuntu@ec2-xx-xx-xx-xxx.compute-1.amazonaws.com

# Connect to instance using Public IP
ssh -i "My-Key-Pair.pem" ubuntu@xx.xx.xx.xxx

SSH connections can be used to copy files to the InterSystems IRIS instance running on the cloud using scp, sftp or an SFTP client like Filezilla.

You should be able to access the Management Portal at the DNS or IP addresses listed, unless the security settings you selected restrict this. To access the Management Portal, append :52773/csp/sys/%25CSP.Portal.Home.zen to the IP or DNS addresss and open in your browser

i.e.

With DNS:
http://ec2-xx-xx-xx-xxx.compute-1.amazonaws.com:52773/csp/sys/%25CSP.Portal.Home.zen

With IP:
xx.xx.xx.xxx:52773/csp/sys/%25CSP.Portal.Home.zen

Where "x" values are the server IP address.

When you are finished working with your InterSystems IRIS Community Edition instance, consider terminating it to avoid excess charges (or wasting free credits).

This guide will walk through how to deploy an instance for InterSystems IRIS Community Edition with a free license on Azure. Before starting, you will need to sign in or create an account on Azure, and also sign up for an Azure Subscription (a project space connected to a billing account). Azure does offer first-time subscribers free credits, so it is possible to try an Azure deployment completely free.

To deploy an instance of InterSystems IRIS Community Edition in the cloud with Azure go to the Azure marketplace listing and click Get it now.

You will be prompted to sign in, and may also be asked for additional details like Country, Mobile number and workplace. Complete this and then click Get it now at the bottom of this form.

You will then be redirected to the Azure Portal. Click Start with a pre-set configuration to get started creating a deployment. If you'd rather select all the settings yourself, you can click Create to deploy without any default configuration.

After choosing to start with a pre-set configuration, you will be redirected to a page suggesting defaults for your use case. Choose your required use case, then click Continue to Create a VM, this choice will automatically pre-fill some of the configuration settings.

You will now enter the "Create a virtual machine" page. This is where you configure all of the settings for your virtual machine deployment.

There are tabs to choose settings under "Basics", "Disks" (storage), "Networking", "Management", "Monitoring", "Advanced Settings" and "Tags". This guide will discuss the settings under "Basics". For the other settings, you can either leave them as the default if you've started with a pre-set configuration, or select them in your own time. Many of these can be changed after deployment (for example limiting the connecting IP addresses).

Here you choose which Azure Subscription and Resource group is being used for the deployment, a resource group allows you to group related deployments (e.g. deployments for different services of a single project) for organization and billing purposes. You will need to create a resource group if you have not done so before. Click Create new and give a suitable name.

The instance details controls the size, location and security settings of the instance. As you have clicked through the Azure portal, the image should have been pre-filled. Otherwise, you can selected through the marketplace dropdown.

There are several essentials to fill out in this section.

- Virtual Machine Name - Preferably use something easy to recognize for ease of management.

- Region - The closer the region is to your users, the less latency when accessing the machine. However, region choice will also affect availability of machines.

- Size - The performance specifications of the machine, including memory and number/type of processors available (CPUs, GPUs). The choice of size will depend on budget, required performance and availability in your selected region. As the InterSystems IRIS Community Edition itself limits the storage in the database and compute power used ( see the limits here), you will probably want to one of the smaller machines.

Here you can choose how you authenticate when connecting to the machine. It's suggested that you use an SSH public/private key pair for this, but you can also use password authentication.You can also select a default username to access the machine.

You can leave all these settings as the default. If you choose to create a new SSH key, it will automatically be generated and downloaded when you deploy the machine.

Once you have set the,"Basics" check through the other tabs of settings and see if there is anything you would like to change from defaults. If not, select the Review + Create tab.

This tab will take a while to load, as it validates your selected settings. After validation has passed, you have to agree to the Terms for the final time, and will also see a summary of your selected settings.

When you are ready click Create to create your virtual machine.

If you have selected to authenticate with an SSH key as suggested, you will be greeted with a pop-up to generate and download this. Click Download private key and create resource.

It will take a couple of minutes for your deployment to launch, but you should end up with a screen saying "Your deployment is complete".

There are several settings which Azure recommends setting, which you may wish to do soon. However, to initially demonstrate connecting to the machine, click Go to resource. This will bring up the management dashboard for your deployed virtual machine.

On the left-hand side there is a panel to select different settings groups to view and edit machine settings. For now though, Select Connect from the panel across the top of the dashboard.

On Azure, Secure Shell (SSH) is the recommended method when connecting to the InterSystems IRIS Community Edition instance. You can connect via SSH from your local machine terminal or powershell.

From the connection panel you will clearly see the IP address of your instance, and an SSH command to use to connect to the instance. The SSH connection command requires three variables, the local path to your private key which was downloaded when you launched the instance, the username on the machine (default was azureuser unless you changed it in the Authentication step above) and the IP address of your instance.

ssh -i /path/to/key.pem username@xx.xx.xxx.xxx

ssh -i /home/keys/My-Iris-Instance_key.pem azureuser@12.34.567.899

On your first time connecting, you will be prompted if you are sure you want to continue connecting. Type "yes" and you will connect to the instance.

The first time you log in, you will need to reset the password from the default. To do this, run:

iris password

A prompt will tell you that the default credentials are:

- Username: _SYSTEM
- Password: SYS

And that this password is expired and needs to be changed.

After changing the password, you can start an IRIS terminal session with:

iris session iris

If you would like to copy files to the IRIS instance, you can use an SSH connection using terminal commands scp, sftp or an SFTP client like Filezilla. You can also copy files via Azure's Bastion service. Note, it is possible that your network settings block these connections.

Once deployed, the Management Portal will be available at the IP address of your instance with :52773/csp/sys/UtilHome.csp appended on the end. The default credentials are:

- Username: _SYSTEM
- Password: SYS

These will need to be changed on first login, unless you have already changed them from the SSH connection.

When you are done evaluating InterSystems IRIS Community Edition on the cloud, it is recommended that you terminate the instance to avoid unwanted charges. To do so, navigate back to the Virtual Machine dashboard for your instance, and click Delete. You will be prompted for which components you want to delete. If you are completely finished using this deployment, select all of the components and click Delete to end all deployments.