InterSystems READY 2025: Deploying Solutions Using InterSystems Package Manager and OCI Artifacts

Deploying Solutions

There are many models of software delivery in the modern workplace, but one of the simplest for the technically savvy is the use of a package manager. Package managers are designed to eliminate the need for manual installation of data; once you have a system connected to a package manager repository, it’s often as simple as a single call to the manager to install a new program, library, or toolset.

Package managers are especially useful in software development, where libraries can be downloaded to quickly augment a software solution with an entirely new set of functionality. Many package managers even support dependency listing, allowing a user to identify the final solution they require and trust the package manager to automatically collect all the various pieces of software it needs. Do you remember the old days when your software didn’t work because you needed some Visual C++ library installed first? Those days are gone in the package manager world.

Not to be outdone by anyone else, InterSystems has their own package manager: IPM. IPM has been around for a while, originally conceived as an open-source project called ZPM. Since InterSystems brought it in-house over a year ago, they’ve enhanced the product and announced a number of new changes in their recent 0.10.0 release.

The primary announcement made during this session was support for ORAS-OCI Registry as Storage. Container technology, defined by the Open Container Initiative, has been used for years to store non-container things. The OCI Artifact project provides a formal approach to this, allowing users to store artifacts with Manifests in a registry and push and pull these artifacts using standard container functionality. Within ORAS, mediaTypes are used to define the type of data stored in the OCI artifact.

This sounds complicated, but it has wide-ranging implications. ORAS support enables developers to pull many things down within IPM, including Large Language Models, files, and even system components. The team presenting even teased that, someday in the future, installers containing just core IRIS and IPM could be distributed, allowing teams to install IRIS or HealthShare components via OCI Registries.

IPM continues to be enhanced by InterSystems and will be included with IRIS 2025.2 and beyond. It will come preinstalled in a later version.

You can find the open-source IPM code [here], and you can find out more about ORAS [here].

J2 Interactive

J2 Interactive is an award-winning software development and IT consulting firm that specializes in customized solutions for healthcare and life sciences.