27 ms·

Azure Jupyter Notebooks

302 points by douche 10y ago

rjbwork 10y ago
Very interesting. I just put some R code into production on Azure via MS R Server (DeployR), and it was not a particularly fun experience. I really want to see them do a hosted R service where we can just take these Jupyter Notebooks and expose it as a web service on a PAYG basis.
- madenine 10y ago
  Depending on what you're doing - deploy a webservice with Azure ML?
  - rjbwork 10y ago
    We looked at that, in fact it was my first recommendation, but the way it forces you to set things up is less than ideal. We may give it another go, but it was not conducive to just taking the data scientist's R code and exposing it as a web endpoint - it requires a complete restructuring of the code.
matt4077 10y ago
The concept of Jupyer Notebooks is absolute fantastic. The product, unfortunately, fails at the basics of being a text editor. I'd wish the VSCode team could somehow integrate the concept. They seem to be excellent at execution. (Or, if they finish their work on "html zones" (block decorators in atom), I'll start doing it myself)
- analog31 10y ago
  Given that Jupyter works on a server / browser model, it should be possible to customize the browser without bothering the server. For instance, I imagine a plug-in that spiffs up the editing blocks within one of the major browsers. That way, you preserve compatibility across all browsers, but provide an option for those who want their preferred editing features. Admittedly, I don't use a code editor, perhaps because I'm just too old, and got used to living without one. I remember when being able to edit a program in full screen mode was a big deal. But I certainly wouldn't turn down better editing for Jupyter.
  - AlexCoventry 10y ago
    It's far from perfect, but there is a jupyter notebook "browser" and editor for emacs: https://github.com/millejoh/emacs-ipython-notebook https://github.com/millejoh/emacs-ipython-notebook
  - bagofmostlyh2o 10y ago
    I use wasavi, https://github.com/akahuku/wasavi https://github.com/akahuku/wasavi, which does exactly what you describe.
- baq 10y ago
  I agree about the editor part, it's quite bad compared to anything people actually use when developing software. ...but perhaps software developers aren't the target audience in the first place. I tried to use Jupyter a few times, first when it was still only IPython, and it never seemed to fit in my code-execute-fix workflow that you have when developing scripts. In particular having to always reset the kernel to reexecute everything from scratch drove me crazy.
  - nnq 10y ago
    > code-execute-fix workflow Do you know of a better tool for such a flow, combined with the ability to have markdown+latex docs intermingled with the code? 'cause this is my workflow, but jupyter's code editor and kernell restart drives me crazy and anything else will have me keep the notes/docs separate from the code... And please don't suggest Mathematica :) I absolutely love it's ux/i, but nobody uses it in ML/AI...
    - arghIdontwantto 10y ago
      Haskell? You can have Literate Haskell (https://wiki.haskell.org/Literate_programming https://wiki.haskell.org/Literate_programming), you have ghci and while commercial, I think http://haskellformac.com http://haskellformac.com will be what you want
    - IanCal 10y ago
      I use rmarkdown for creating data reports to deliver to people http://rmarkdown.rstudio.com/ http://rmarkdown.rstudio.com/ You can use whatever editor you want, but I quite like rstudio (I'm generally not a huge R person, so an environment with more help is useful, whereas with python I'd prefer just my own setup). Edit - Importantly though, you actually don't need to use R, you can use python. I'm not sure how well that works with caching, as I've never tried it, but it's probably worth a go.
      - nnq 10y ago
        hmm... thanks for making me take another look around. I'm trying rstudio+python and rodeo tonight to see if I like them better. (Right now I use jupyter for some things, ipython gui for others, and pycharm for "real coding" tasks. Tried Spyder, but something about it makes it neither a good IDE nor a good notes/documentation system... though I can understand its appeal for Matlab folks).
- Steeeve 10y ago
  For emacs users, there are python source code blocks in org mode. http://orgmode.org/worg/org-contrib/babel/languages/ob-doc-python.html http://orgmode.org/worg/org-contrib/babel/languages/ob-doc-p... I haven't played with it yet, but another HN user pointed it out to me recently.
- gressquel 10y ago
  the UI is really bad. Idea is great from Microsoft but the execution leaves alot to be desired. I hope MS fixes this because I kinda like this service and can see myself using it.
  - smortaz 10y ago
    Thanks for feedback. We hope to keep iterating on the UI in the coming year. We'd love to improve it based on your suggestions (we're admittedly weak on that front). nbhelp@microsoft.com.
- gaius 10y ago
  Right, this notebook or worksheet style interface isn't meant to be a text editor tho', or to develop software it's meant to interactively help you write a paper or a report. We had this in MathCAD in the '90s, where it used MS Word as it's "editor" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathcad https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathcad
  - smortaz 10y ago
    [msft] Yep. Check out Jupyter Lab which tries address other scenarios. A lightweight IDE with notebook, file, editor, windowing support: https://github.com/jupyterlab/jupyterlab https://github.com/jupyterlab/jupyterlab
    - fperez_org 10y ago
      And btw, it's worth mentioning that in JupyterLab, we just merged a PR that will make embedding the Monaco editor (the editing component of VS code) much easier: https://github.com/jupyterlab/jupyterlab/pull/1140 https://github.com/jupyterlab/jupyterlab/pull/1140. With that in, now the Monaco integration is being worked on: https://github.com/jupyterlab/jupyterlab/pull/1382 https://github.com/jupyterlab/jupyterlab/pull/1382. We all want stronger editing capabilities, but it doesn't make sense for the Jupyter team to get into the business of writing text editors (plenty of better folks doing a great job on that already). So we're just trying to make it easier to integrate other text editors into the everyday workflow.
      - smortaz 10y ago
        [msft] Well, this is an honor - the creator of Jupyter commenting on this thread & not just any comment... but about embedding the Visual Studio Code editor in Jupyter Lab :). Thanks Fernando, Brian, Min & team for everything you've done with Jupyter. Looking fwd to using Jlab soon! s
        fperez_org 10y ago
        +1 to the team that's been doing a phenomenal job on the project... These days I'm just an email answering machine :) But yes, JLab is shaping up quite nicely, opening up a lot of interesting possibilities. For advanced users/early adopters I think it's time to start playing with it (and filing issues for anything that's broken/sub-optimal, we really want to provide a great user experience with it once we hit 1.0).
- pYQAJ6Zm 10y ago
  I suggest having a look at the jupyter-vim-binding¹ extension. It improves the experience for those comfortable with Vim. ¹ https://github.com/lambdalisue/jupyter-vim-binding https://github.com/lambdalisue/jupyter-vim-binding
- baldfat 10y ago
  I absolutely LOVE Jupyter but I personally have found something better. I also love that Microsoft is behind making this happen with Jupyter. RStudio's new feature to R is Notebooks and it is available in RStudio version 1.0+. It takes what is great about Jupyter Notebooks and adds easier version control and much easier to batch process your reports. Which are both huge wins for me. http://rmarkdown.rstudio.com/r_notebooks.html http://rmarkdown.rstudio.com/r_notebooks.html Blog Post: https://blog.rstudio.org/2016/10/05/r-notebooks/ https://blog.rstudio.org/2016/10/05/r-notebooks/ "Interactive R Markdown As an authoring format, R Markdown bears many similarities to traditional notebooks like Jupyter and Beaker. However, code in notebooks is typically executed interactively, one cell at a time, whereas code in R Markdown documents is typically executed in batch. R Notebooks bring the interactive model of execution to your R Markdown documents, giving you the capability to work quickly and iteratively in a notebook interface without leaving behind the plain-text tools and production-quality output you’ve come to rely on from R Markdown."
- a-saleh 10y ago
  I listened to a podcast about jupyter [1] some time ago, and remebered them talking about the separation between the kernel and the presentation in jupyter, and that in theory, it should be relatively easy to write your own frontend, that just sends to correct messages to the zmq :-) Afaik, hydrogen plugin for atom does this [2] And there is another plugin that just wraps the notebook to live inside of atom [3] [1] https://talkpython.fm/episodes/show/44/project-jupyter-and-ipython https://talkpython.fm/episodes/show/44/project-jupyter-and-i... [2] https://atom.io/packages/hydrogen https://atom.io/packages/hydrogen [3] https://github.com/jupyter/atom-notebook https://github.com/jupyter/atom-notebook
- smortaz 10y ago
  [msft] You are quite correct that the REPL/cell paradigm has its pluses & minuses. That's why the follow on (Jupyter Lab), is addressing many of these issues. Check out: https://github.com/jupyterlab/jupyterlab https://github.com/jupyterlab/jupyterlab
enricosada 10y ago
Awesome to see F# supported, based on OSS F# for Jupyter Notebooks (https://github.com/fsprojects/IfSharp https://github.com/fsprojects/IfSharp) work. It's really lovely when a tool written in another tech (Python there) can be used/extended with others stack/tech, because was written as language agnostic. That should be a rule for good design in oss tooling. Not starting using language specific communication, but extensibile from day0 in design (obv default language can be bundled)
- nnq 10y ago
  Seeing APIs that look like: Chart.Line(data) |> Chart.WithTitle("smth") |> ... ...makes anyone say "yuck" and avoiding F# for any exploratory work. And even after you understand how the pipe operator works and how useful it can be in other contexts. I mean, ugh... Even putting up with superfluous verbosity like `List.Map(myList)` instead of a `map(myList, ...)` or `myList.map(...)` because "that's how F#/OCaml does it, stfu" is ok, but this seems like purposeful obsfucation. No wonder R and Python are the only languages popular in ML. They are the only ones leading to sane readable code by people having other stuff to keep loaded in their head than language details. I mean, yeah, syntax that doesn't matter, unless it's so f annoying and ugly that you simply can't put up with it as much as you try!
  - KirinDave 10y ago
    I'm... confused what you're upset about. Are you upset about the leading "Chart?" This is very, very easy stuff for functional programming. Most of the people I know in ML, talented ML folks doing data science within the org I work for to do exciting things... they actually aren't huge fans of the way Python does things. They're huge fans of the libraries Python has to speed up ML work. F# has a real lack there (surprisingly!). But like, saying that you like: Chart.Line(data).WithTitle("smth").render() as opposed to: Chart.Line(data) |> Chart.WithTitle("smdh") seems to me like 6 of one or half a dozen of the other. Especially since when you're reusing any given part of the pipeline, the ML way is alot more terse. And it's not like Python is devoid of hideous examples of poor language design. For example, self parameters. All we're told is some new age mysticism about how "explicit is better than implicit", but somehow that doesn't apply when we need higher order functions and we're using private function with lambda names to try and signal to readers that, "Sorry I needed 2 statements in my list comprehension and Python talks down to me like that guy from Timecube because of it." Why is explicitness valuable there but not on tuple construction? And it's not like Python doesn't make you arbitrarily choose between List.function and list.method with no seeming decisions to make. Which is not to say Python is especially bad. It is to say that you may have normalized Python so much that you forget all computer languages are somewhat arbitrary.
sixhobbits 10y ago
This looks really nice. I've always hated how buggy the free hosted Jupyter notebook services are, and setting up a remote server yourself is definitely not a one-click experience. Surprised to see how unrestricted this is (for now anyway). They'll probably see some abuse of the resources soon and add more restrictions. The "etc" from the restrictions section of the faq is pretty broad. "Usage should be limited to learning, research, general computing, etc."
- chupapuma 10y ago
  Thanks sixhobbits. Our goal isn't to restrict you if it isn't required. We do need to maintain the right to stop people from abusing this and make sure there is room on the service for multiple users. Aside from that you are basically free to party on :) - Azure Notebooks Dev
tonyedgecombe 10y ago
Yet another product where I haven't got a clue what it is after reading the front page.
- Senderman 10y ago
  I had the same problem; This cleared it up: http://jupyter.org http://jupyter.org
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - Pigo 10y ago
    I actually thought this was some kind of laptop for awhile, even after reading much of the front page. I googled Jupyter Notebook after a few context clues finally tipped me off. I just thought I was being dense, though.
- smortaz 10y ago
  [msft] Yes, we should improve the FP, especially for those who aren't familiar with Jupyter. Meanwhile, I hope this answers a few q's: https://notebooks.azure.com/faq https://notebooks.azure.com/faq
askvictor 10y ago
And today I was just about to spin up a jupyterhub server for my class...
- smortaz 10y ago
  [msft] Feel free to use it for your class askvictor & let us know ushow it does and how we can improve the service! For a sample course that was taught for ~400 students this fall, see: https://notebooks.azure.com/library/CUED-IA-Computing-Michaelmas https://notebooks.azure.com/library/CUED-IA-Computing-Michae...
  - askvictor 10y ago
    I certainly will; this couldn't have dropped at a better time!
pjmlp 10y ago
Great to see F# on the samples list.
hatmatrix 10y ago
Is this just a hosting solution for Jupyter Notebooks? Or does it add something to the standard Jupyter Notebooks?
- rahrahrah 10y ago
  I'd like to hear an answer to this as well.
- rickycook 10y ago
  it seems to have forking, and allows you to execute the code on the back end so kind of a learning environment, because you can have people fork something like a ML notebook and play around with the different parameters
- smortaz 10y ago
  Hi hatmatrix - Currently it's primarily a hosted jupyter service - you can view with no login, or create/run if you login. It does not modify Jupyter itself in any significant way. We hope to add various features in the coming year. In its current form it can be used as a scratchpad, for classes, webinars, conferences, etc. where you have say 100+ ppl that quickly need to follow a tutorial without spending time on installation (it has Anaconda sitting underneath Python).
- KirinDave 10y ago
  Just a note, if you have F# you can install Mbrace. Which means you can actually split workflows arbitrarily from inside the notebook. That's really, really powerful.
zargath 10y ago
just small bug 1: Click "sign in". 2: Choose account I want to signin with 3: Click "cancel". 4: I get "500, Runtime Error" without custom error page. Anyway, looks interresting
- chupapuma 10y ago
  I filed a bug for you on our GitHub issue tracker. Thanks! https://github.com/Microsoft/AzureNotebooks/issues/20 https://github.com/Microsoft/AzureNotebooks/issues/20
JayOtter 10y ago
Or, if you prefer your interactive notebooks not to rely on a backend service: http://www.joelotter.com/kajero/ http://www.joelotter.com/kajero/
- anc84 10y ago
  That only works with JavaScript though or am I overlooking something?
  - JayOtter 10y ago
    Currently, yeah, just JS. It's aimed more at non-technical folks - the "clever graphing" stuff should work without writing much code, if any.
    - Sean1708 10y ago
      > Currently, yeah, just JS. How do they plan to make it support multiple languages without having a backend service?
      - jsjohnst 10y ago
        There are a number of projects for transpiling X language into JavaScript. Most aren't super robust, but generally good enough for basic purposes. I feel once WebAssembly gets more steam, this will get even more robust. Not claiming this is a good solution, but definitely would be one possible route.
nickcw 10y ago
I've been experimenting with Jupyter notebooks recently so I thought I'd try uploading one I made which solves a wooden puzzle. It seemed to work just fine! https://notebooks.azure.com/library/puzzles https://notebooks.azure.com/library/puzzles I had to host the images in the notebook elsewhere rather than upload them with the notebook. It looks like that is possible but then I'd have to grapple with Azure blobs...
- arethuza 10y ago
  Working with Azure Storage Blobs is pretty straightforward - you can use the cross platform azure CLI application or use the Azure Storage Explorer application (which appears to be cross-platform as well in its latest form): http://storageexplorer.com/ http://storageexplorer.com/
  - Pigo 10y ago
    I've been using the linux version for a couple months now, and it's a truck ton better than exploring through VS. I'm still waiting for it to support tabs, or any other multi-tasking interface. That's sort of a pain.
    - viggity 10y ago
      for those on windows and don't mind dropping a little $, I've been relatively happy with CloudXPlorer http://clumsyleaf.com/products/cloudxplorer http://clumsyleaf.com/products/cloudxplorer for browsing blobs. Has most of the features I care about TableXPlorer (for Azure Table Storage is decent too)
- AdamSC1 10y ago
  Pretty surprised at this as well. But, given you know this requirement now, is it safe to assume that if you embed remote images in your notebooks in future and upload them you'll have no issue? (i.e. it's not stripping them out and making you manually re-embed them each time if they aren't an Azure blob?)
- euroclydon 10y ago
anc84 10y ago
Is it possible to share them publically, without the need for a Microsoft account for the user?
- elsen 10y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13104807 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13104807 Click on the eye icon. You won't be able to run the notebook code, which would be a surprising thing to allow without some sort of authentication.
  - anc84 10y ago
    That's a shame, I was hoping to be able to use these for interactive learning. Requiring signup is a showstopper for me. :(
    - MikusR 10y ago
      If requiring signup is a showstopper how are you posting on HN?
      - jsjohnst 10y ago
        Having taught after school programs for kids, it definitely is a barrier to entry. I'd not say it's a show stopper, but it's definitely a hassle. Even more relevant when the folks needing to sign up, "can't" easily (due to COPPA).
        smortaz 10y ago
        [msft] Understood. Note that you can view notebooks w/o login. If you want a truly no login experience, try the awesome https://tmpnb.org https://tmpnb.org service. But note that these are temporary (tmp-nb...) and will go away. The login we require is to show you your notebooks next time you're back. If your school has office365 the existing creds should just work.
cbHXBY1D 10y ago
The "Import from Dropbox" feature is currently broken. Shame because it would be useful for data scientists...
- chupapuma 10y ago
  Thanks for the feedback cbHXBY1D. We discovered this having issues just a bit back. We have some devs looking at it now and hopefully can have it up and running soon. If this is blocking you, there are libs to use dropbox throuhg python: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/dropbox https://pypi.python.org/pypi/dropbox -Azure Notebooks Dev
AdamSC1 10y ago
I am a huge fan of Jupyter notebooks, the idea of being able to run my code easily alongside natural prose is crucial when telling the story of data. But, Jupyter faces most of it's challenges in the word-editor part of their product rather than in the code part. I'd love to see a partnership between them and the Eve programming language (http://witheve.com/ http://witheve.com/) who have absolutely mastered the IDE interface in early renditions of their product. I know a lot of people are against the concept of Eve from a purist perspective of code not needing to be humanized. But, one of the common goals in data is to communicate insights and solutions through visually crafted and accessible stories. I think there is still a long way we can come in that.
dobin 10y ago
Pretty interesting as a tool to learn Python or other things. I'm intrigued. I'm doing something similar with exploit development learning, but with a javascript based terminal and linux containers, and a markdown writeup (https://exploit.courses https://exploit.courses for anyone interested). But the close interaction of code and text in Jupyter is much more advanced, and useful :-)
FLGMwt 10y ago
Supported languages are: Python (2/3), R, F#
bargl 10y ago
OK this is freaking awesome. I've been working on some Machine Learning courses and they use Jupyter. I have the issue where whenever I switch computers I have to sync files and all that jazz. I'm so excited about this tool I can't even contain myself.
mrmondo 10y ago
Sorry to sound cynical but haven't they taken something that's existed for a long time and spent money on marketing it to add / repair value to their brand? It feels a little obvious to me to be honest?
- wyldfire 10y ago
  I suppose it's publicly hosted which might be rare or totally new. TBH the most frustrating thing is that unlike github's notebook hosting you need to login just to view the content. And for some reason the back button doesn't work once you encounter the login page. That's enough to make me want to stay away.
  - chupapuma 10y ago
    Thanks for the feedback wyldfire. I am a dev on Azure Notebooks and wanted to mention we do allow viewing the content without login. However, to be in an executable context (jupyter) we require login. Our samples, in order to avoid extra clicks, take you straight into an executable environment. Any notebook can be opened in an html view: https://notebooks.azure.com/library/fsharp/html/FSharp%20for%20Azure%20Notebooks.ipynb https://notebooks.azure.com/library/fsharp/html/FSharp%20for... It sounds like you would like being able to view those more easily without logging in? Thanks! Chris
    - wyldfire 10y ago
      Thanks for being so responsive, Chris. I think that the 'view notebook' [eye icon] is too out-of-the-way to notice. IMO a design that might be less surprising would be for clicking on the name of the notebook to take you to the read-only view of the notebook. From there you could click on something that would promote it to an executable/editable view and login if necessary. But the broken back button on login page is a real bummer. EDIT either it was my imagination to begin with or it's already fixed because I tried it again and the back button appears to work correctly.
- KirinDave 10y ago
  Actually, this is somewhat surprising. It's taking what many, MANY data scientists and analysts are actually using day-to-day and making it point-and-click to start in the cloud. You can set these things up in AWS and GCE, but it requires a lot more work. Here is my top google hit for setting things up on AWS, from a relatively recent and maintained repository: https://gist.github.com/iamatypeofwalrus/5183133 https://gist.github.com/iamatypeofwalrus/5183133 Many data scientists just run their notebooks locally. Few have the luxury of Data Science Engineers on hand to help them through the complex world of provisioning and maintaining servers, even in this canned AWS world where spark clusters unfold themselves in EMR. Azure is absolutely full of "here is a canned solution for _insert common engineer task with open source focus here_" buttons and it's really quite great as a result. Also: Azure is doing a very good job of making it difficult to have a default-insecure instance. You don't make choices about encryption-at-rest, for example. That's forced on you. There is a lot more tooling around sharing accounts and giving users minimal ACLs rather than just doing the simple thing in AWS or GCE and giving out power user accounts. It's simple stuff, of course, but this simple stuff is the simple stuff AWS has elected not to do, so...
dandare 10y ago
I have not visited any Microsoft property for some time now and I have this strange feeling about the UX. Sadly I can not say if it is my deeply rooted aversion against everything Microsoft or if the UX is really odd.
- r3bl 10y ago
  It is very odd-looking. And it's really slow. It took me 55 seconds to load the page (42 of which went into downloading a 6 MB large GIF). 40+ requests. And it doesn't seem like a slow Internet problem at all.
  - smortaz 10y ago
    [msft] Guilty as charged. The GIF will be gone soon. Though it loads in < 1 sec for me (~20Mbps). Thanks!
- julienchastang 10y ago
  I think your impressions of Microsoft are out-of-date. We've been successfully using Azure resources through "Azure for Research" grants. My world, is the world of Linux VMs, Docker, and OSS and I find Azure to be a good fit for our research needs. (I never touch any Windows OS, if that's what you are worried about.)
- TallGuyShort 10y ago
  I was in a similar situation a short time ago. Although I found it required a lot of screen space to work well, it could be a little slow, and it took some getting used to, it really grew on me. The hierarchical drill-down was really nice once you had a lot of different types of resources. I like AWS' interface, but sometimes I miss the feel of that navigation...
- chupapuma 10y ago
  Hi dandare. I am a dev on Azure Notebooks at Microsoft and can tell you that our team also delivers Python Tools for Visual Studio, Azure SDK for Python, R Tools for Visual Studio, and previously Node.js Tools for Visual Studio. The UX was not done in any way to feel like something else. We tried to design something that worked well for Jupyter users as well as looked nice and was usable. That being said, our teams strengths are not in UX by far. We are starting to work with designers to improve the "dev-UI"" we currently have. If you have any more feedback you would like to share we would love to hear it. There is a public tracker at https://github.com/microsoft/azurenotebooks https://github.com/microsoft/azurenotebooks and an email that goes to the team at nbhelp@microsoft.com
karl42 10y ago
There's also https://wakari.io/ https://wakari.io/ by continuum analytics. Can anyone summarize the differences?
- smortaz 10y ago
  [msft] Wakari is a more complete product from our partners at Continuum.io (we use their Anaconda distro for Azure Notebooks). We have various improvements planned & hope to reach parity soon!
tedmiston 10y ago
This is an awesome offering from MS. I'm not sure I understand this bit though — by "data" do they mean they'll delete a notebook not accesssed for 60 days? > Storage: We reserve the right to remove your data from our storage after 60 days of inactivity to avoid storing unused/abandoned user data
- smortaz 10y ago
  [msft] Proper data support is coming. I believe it's meant as: if you upload a ton of data & seem to have abandoned it, it'll eventually go away. Admittedly vague, will be made more crisp in the faq. Thanks!
- chupapuma 10y ago
  If you don't access your account for 60 days we reserve the right to remove your data (currently Notebooks but eventually notebooks, csv files, etc). This is to avoid us wasting storage on users that aren't actually using the service. As we are still new, we haven't started deleting files yet, but we wanted to be sure to have a policy for handling this upfront and not decide when there was a problem later and then start destroying content without any sort of notice. Thanks! -Azure Notebooks Dev
smortaz 10y ago
Hi folks - Thanks for taking a look at Azure notebooks. Here's some background info: What is it? It's an offshoot of Azure ML Studio which has Jupyter support. We asked the powers that be if we could also instantiate it also as a free service - "yes" was the answer. Who is it aimed at? Students, faculty, casual users, folks that want to give webinars, classrooms, etc & want to skip software install headaches. What does it support? Currently R, Py2, Py3, F#. Python is backed by the Anaconda distro. More kernels will be added based on user feedback. Environment runs on Linux/docker. Is it free? Yes. I need an account? Not to view content (a la nbviewer). To run, create notebooks, etc. you need a Microsoft account (xbox, outlook, hotmail, ...). Sample notebook to view (click on the eyeball): https://notebooks.azure.com/library/LIGOOpenScienceCenter https://notebooks.azure.com/library/LIGOOpenScienceCenter I don't like the UI! We are admittedly not UI people and are grateful to our summer intern for the current UI! Please send feedback to nbhelp@microsoft.com and we'll improve it! [EDIT: additions:] Can I get a bash prompt, install linux pkgs? Yes! In Jupyter, you can click on Terminal & you are in bash (ubuntu). Can I use pip, install.packages(), nuget, ... ? In Python/R/F#, you can use each environment's pkg mgr to install pkgs. EG "!pip install pkg", install.packages("ggplot2"), etc. See Py examples here: https://notebooks.azure.com/library/Intro_To_CNTK https://notebooks.azure.com/library/Intro_To_CNTK Is my environments saved? Currently, your notebooks are saved based on your login. Proper data, load github repo, etc. support is coming. For a bit more info, please view the faq: https://notebooks.azure.com/faq https://notebooks.azure.com/faq Thanks! [msft]
- baldfat 10y ago
  > Thanks! [msft] No thank you! I have been running a server on my own server at home, but this has so many awesome possibilities. I can see this as my go to for introducing Python or R in the near future.
- hedgehog 10y ago
  Are there plans to add GPU support?
  - smortaz 10y ago
    [msft] Yes! Azure N-Series was announced recently and we hope to make it an option (HW selection in general). Whether it'll be free or not is above my pay grade. Would be nice to have a free tier at least (time/size).
reacharavindh 10y ago
Did not expect this to happen with Microsoft. Giving away access to a public Jupyter Server (open source project) Running it in Linux (Ubuntu) and letting users have a play with it. I for one am super happy to play with it however long this lasts. Some info so far. !free -h total used free shared buff/cache available Mem: 55G 7.5G 26G 70M 21G 44G Swap: 99G 0B 99G !uname -a Linux nbserver 4.4.0-51-generic #72-Ubuntu SMP Thu Nov 24 18:29:54 UTC 2016 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux Look! I can even install stuff I want from pip... !pip install terminaltables Collecting terminaltables Downloading terminaltables-3.1.0.tar.gz Building wheels for collected packages: terminaltables Running setup.py bdist_wheel for terminaltables ... - \ done Stored in directory: /home/nbuser/.cache/pip/wheels/96/0c/9a/0ec2bcad2ac1fb1d0e4695879386460cec1a947cd7413d1b17 Successfully built terminaltables Installing collected packages: terminaltables Successfully installed terminaltables-3.1.0 You are using pip version 8.1.2, however version 9.0.1 is available. You should consider upgrading via the 'pip install --upgrade pip' command.
- smortaz 10y ago
  [msft] :). Interestingly enough, the decision to use linux/docker was a no-brainer. I know from the outside it might seem odd, but these days, the attitude (and rightly so) is: use the language/stack/OS/toolchain/etc. you need to get your job done. I think you'll see an explosion of Linux/Python/Java/Go/... internally & externally on Azure. Data point - our team (Python), wanted to hold a "Python day @ msft" event to teach/inform internal teams on the language/ecosystem. We were hoping maybe 50..100 would show up, if lucky. A thousand and twenty one people showed up! Another data point - the official Azure CLI was just rewritten in Python (win/macos/linux): https://github.com/Azure/azure-cli https://github.com/Azure/azure-cli Thanks!
  - denfromufa 10y ago
    Maybe it runs on Linux because jupyterhub does not work on Windows, not even on Linux subsystem? Microsoft ported docker to Windows, please do the same with jupyterhub!
mmsmatt 10y ago
Clicked link from IE11. Got this: > "Internet Explorer is not supported by Jupyter: For best results use Microsoft Edge, Chrome, Firefox, or another modern browser." This makes me so happy - MS products leaving old browsers behind gives all web developers a ball and bat in the same fight.
asadm 10y ago
This is amazing, I had set up a jupyter hub using some docker hacks to allow my students to access their own personal instance(running inside a new container) using github login. This might be a good low-cost alternative. Thanks Azure!
- smortaz 10y ago
  [msft] Awesome! Cambridge University (Dr Wells) just did that. Here's their notebook: https://notebooks.azure.com/library/CUED-IA-Computing-Michaelmas https://notebooks.azure.com/library/CUED-IA-Computing-Michae...
luzvioleta 10y ago
I use notebooks a lot, but with Julia. In any case, this is <3 amazing news !
- smortaz 10y ago
  +1 for Julia - Please kindly file a request on github: https://github.com/Microsoft/AzureNotebooks https://github.com/Microsoft/AzureNotebooks (user request > our wishes)
  - luzvioleta 10y ago
    Hey ! It's already posted <3 https://github.com/Microsoft/AzureNotebooks/issues/4 https://github.com/Microsoft/AzureNotebooks/issues/4
closeparen 10y ago
One of my physics major friends uses a Chromebook (and a shitty Windows laptop he prefers not to deal with). I set up a DigitalOcean droplet for him to run Jupyter. One of the big problems is that it's not safe for him to share Jupyter notebooks by URL, since anyone to whom he discloses the web UI password gets remote code execution (exec and friends work). A professionally maintained, sufficiently sandboxed Jupyter environment could be awesome for people who want to work on and share Jupyter notebooks, but not be responsible for servers.
- smortaz 10y ago
  [msft] Agree 100%. Focus on science, not scaffolding maintenance. Sharing is basic now (ie unlisted-URL), but proper support (public/private/ro/etc) is coming soon.
- simonbyrne 10y ago
  Check out https://juliabox.com/ https://juliabox.com/, which despite the name also supports Python. (Disclaimer: service is run by my employer)
  - closeparen 10y ago
    Your CSS is very broken in Chrome, would love to check it out though.
    - simonbyrne 10y ago
      I don't have any issues with Chrome: would you mind sending me a screenshot (simonbyrne@gmail.com)?
      - closeparen 10y ago
        Working now, must've been a transient issue with where the CSS was hosted. Looks awesome!
fonnesbeck 10y ago
Seems like they did something to the notebook interface to make it more responsive on tablets. I usually cannot manipulate Jupyter notebooks from an iPad, but I can here. Is this just a MS modification?
stcredzero 10y ago
This looks like a Microsoft hosted cloud based "Dynabook." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynabook https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynabook Is that what it basically is?
- smortaz 10y ago
  [msft] Not sure. It's a hosted Jupyter Notebook service. A Notebook here is a polyglot, browser based, REPL on steroids. See: http://jupyter.org http://jupyter.org Sample notebooks (html captures of runnable notebooks): https://nbviewer.jupyter.org/ https://nbviewer.jupyter.org/
  - stcredzero 10y ago
    A Notebook here is a polyglot, browser based, REPL on steroids. Smalltalk is somewhat of a primitive browser and very much a REPL on steroids. Instead of being polyglot from the standpoint of supporting multiple languages, Smalltalk was designed to be usable by people from grade school students up through researchers. (It largely succeeded in that goal, but failed in that it didn't attain enough popularity with mainstream engineers/programmers.) Some of the educational uses of Squeak Smalltalk are very much in the same vein.
rem1313 10y ago
Excited! Let's load some data and try it out! Ok, let's use OneDrive to load data. Where is that option? Nvm, let's use Dropbox instead. Does not work "Something went wrong. Please refresh the page." Maybe Azure storage? Trying to sign-up, filled sign-up form, verified account via SMS, entered CC data. Nope! "Cannot proceed with signup due to issue with your account. Contact support". (tried multiple times) Contacting support.. creating incident, describing the issue. When trying to attach screenshot I get "The file upload service server is not available at this time. Wait a few minutes and then try it again." Seriously, Microsoft??
- smortaz 10y ago
  [msft] RE Dropbox - Very sorry about that :(. We discovered an issue earlier and are feverishly looking at fixing it. Will remove the UI until it is fixed. Meanwhile you can !curl in data among other approaches. RE Storage/CC sign up. I'll locate someone in that group & reply back.
  - rem1313 10y ago
    Thanks! Somebody got back to me and apparently prepaid CC are not supported
vaibhavsagar 10y ago
This is very similar to Sage Math Cloud: https://cloud.sagemath.com/ https://cloud.sagemath.com/
piec 10y ago
You can reach the jupyterlab[1] ui using that kind of url: https://notebooks.azure.com/n/<...>/lab https://notebooks.azure.com/n/<...>/lab (i.e. replace /tree with /lab) [1] https://github.com/jupyterlab/jupyterlab https://github.com/jupyterlab/jupyterlab
todd8 10y ago
Jupiter is a great project for data scientists. Here is a one sentence explanation from jupyter.org: "The Jupyter Notebook is a web application that allows you to create and share documents that contain live code, equations, visualizations and explanatory text."

302 points by douche 10y ago

Very interesting. I just put some R code into production on Azure via MS R Server (DeployR), and it was not a particularly fun experience. I really want to see them do a hosted R service where we can just take these Jupyter Notebooks and expose it as a web service on a PAYG basis.

madenine 10y ago
Depending on what you're doing - deploy a webservice with Azure ML?
- rjbwork 10y ago
  We looked at that, in fact it was my first recommendation, but the way it forces you to set things up is less than ideal. We may give it another go, but it was not conducive to just taking the data scientist's R code and exposing it as a web endpoint - it requires a complete restructuring of the code.

matt4077 10y ago

The concept of Jupyer Notebooks is absolute fantastic. The product, unfortunately, fails at the basics of being a text editor. I'd wish the VSCode team could somehow integrate the concept. They seem to be excellent at execution. (Or, if they finish their work on "html zones" (block decorators in atom), I'll start doing it myself)

analog31 10y ago
Given that Jupyter works on a server / browser model, it should be possible to customize the browser without bothering the server. For instance, I imagine a plug-in that spiffs up the editing blocks within one of the major browsers. That way, you preserve compatibility across all browsers, but provide an option for those who want their preferred editing features. Admittedly, I don't use a code editor, perhaps because I'm just too old, and got used to living without one. I remember when being able to edit a program in full screen mode was a big deal. But I certainly wouldn't turn down better editing for Jupyter.
- AlexCoventry 10y ago
  It's far from perfect, but there is a jupyter notebook "browser" and editor for emacs: https://github.com/millejoh/emacs-ipython-notebook https://github.com/millejoh/emacs-ipython-notebook
- bagofmostlyh2o 10y ago
  I use wasavi, https://github.com/akahuku/wasavi https://github.com/akahuku/wasavi, which does exactly what you describe.
baq 10y ago
I agree about the editor part, it's quite bad compared to anything people actually use when developing software. ...but perhaps software developers aren't the target audience in the first place. I tried to use Jupyter a few times, first when it was still only IPython, and it never seemed to fit in my code-execute-fix workflow that you have when developing scripts. In particular having to always reset the kernel to reexecute everything from scratch drove me crazy.
- nnq 10y ago
  > code-execute-fix workflow Do you know of a better tool for such a flow, combined with the ability to have markdown+latex docs intermingled with the code? 'cause this is my workflow, but jupyter's code editor and kernell restart drives me crazy and anything else will have me keep the notes/docs separate from the code... And please don't suggest Mathematica :) I absolutely love it's ux/i, but nobody uses it in ML/AI...
  - arghIdontwantto 10y ago
    Haskell? You can have Literate Haskell (https://wiki.haskell.org/Literate_programming https://wiki.haskell.org/Literate_programming), you have ghci and while commercial, I think http://haskellformac.com http://haskellformac.com will be what you want
  - IanCal 10y ago
    I use rmarkdown for creating data reports to deliver to people http://rmarkdown.rstudio.com/ http://rmarkdown.rstudio.com/ You can use whatever editor you want, but I quite like rstudio (I'm generally not a huge R person, so an environment with more help is useful, whereas with python I'd prefer just my own setup). Edit - Importantly though, you actually don't need to use R, you can use python. I'm not sure how well that works with caching, as I've never tried it, but it's probably worth a go.
    - nnq 10y ago
      hmm... thanks for making me take another look around. I'm trying rstudio+python and rodeo tonight to see if I like them better. (Right now I use jupyter for some things, ipython gui for others, and pycharm for "real coding" tasks. Tried Spyder, but something about it makes it neither a good IDE nor a good notes/documentation system... though I can understand its appeal for Matlab folks).
Steeeve 10y ago
For emacs users, there are python source code blocks in org mode. http://orgmode.org/worg/org-contrib/babel/languages/ob-doc-python.html http://orgmode.org/worg/org-contrib/babel/languages/ob-doc-p... I haven't played with it yet, but another HN user pointed it out to me recently.
gressquel 10y ago
the UI is really bad. Idea is great from Microsoft but the execution leaves alot to be desired. I hope MS fixes this because I kinda like this service and can see myself using it.
- smortaz 10y ago
  Thanks for feedback. We hope to keep iterating on the UI in the coming year. We'd love to improve it based on your suggestions (we're admittedly weak on that front). nbhelp@microsoft.com.
gaius 10y ago
Right, this notebook or worksheet style interface isn't meant to be a text editor tho', or to develop software it's meant to interactively help you write a paper or a report. We had this in MathCAD in the '90s, where it used MS Word as it's "editor" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathcad https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathcad
- smortaz 10y ago
  [msft] Yep. Check out Jupyter Lab which tries address other scenarios. A lightweight IDE with notebook, file, editor, windowing support: https://github.com/jupyterlab/jupyterlab https://github.com/jupyterlab/jupyterlab
  - fperez_org 10y ago
    And btw, it's worth mentioning that in JupyterLab, we just merged a PR that will make embedding the Monaco editor (the editing component of VS code) much easier: https://github.com/jupyterlab/jupyterlab/pull/1140 https://github.com/jupyterlab/jupyterlab/pull/1140. With that in, now the Monaco integration is being worked on: https://github.com/jupyterlab/jupyterlab/pull/1382 https://github.com/jupyterlab/jupyterlab/pull/1382. We all want stronger editing capabilities, but it doesn't make sense for the Jupyter team to get into the business of writing text editors (plenty of better folks doing a great job on that already). So we're just trying to make it easier to integrate other text editors into the everyday workflow.
    - smortaz 10y ago
      [msft] Well, this is an honor - the creator of Jupyter commenting on this thread & not just any comment... but about embedding the Visual Studio Code editor in Jupyter Lab :). Thanks Fernando, Brian, Min & team for everything you've done with Jupyter. Looking fwd to using Jlab soon! s
      - fperez_org 10y ago
        +1 to the team that's been doing a phenomenal job on the project... These days I'm just an email answering machine :) But yes, JLab is shaping up quite nicely, opening up a lot of interesting possibilities. For advanced users/early adopters I think it's time to start playing with it (and filing issues for anything that's broken/sub-optimal, we really want to provide a great user experience with it once we hit 1.0).
pYQAJ6Zm 10y ago
I suggest having a look at the jupyter-vim-binding¹ extension. It improves the experience for those comfortable with Vim. ¹ https://github.com/lambdalisue/jupyter-vim-binding https://github.com/lambdalisue/jupyter-vim-binding
baldfat 10y ago
I absolutely LOVE Jupyter but I personally have found something better. I also love that Microsoft is behind making this happen with Jupyter. RStudio's new feature to R is Notebooks and it is available in RStudio version 1.0+. It takes what is great about Jupyter Notebooks and adds easier version control and much easier to batch process your reports. Which are both huge wins for me. http://rmarkdown.rstudio.com/r_notebooks.html http://rmarkdown.rstudio.com/r_notebooks.html Blog Post: https://blog.rstudio.org/2016/10/05/r-notebooks/ https://blog.rstudio.org/2016/10/05/r-notebooks/ "Interactive R Markdown As an authoring format, R Markdown bears many similarities to traditional notebooks like Jupyter and Beaker. However, code in notebooks is typically executed interactively, one cell at a time, whereas code in R Markdown documents is typically executed in batch. R Notebooks bring the interactive model of execution to your R Markdown documents, giving you the capability to work quickly and iteratively in a notebook interface without leaving behind the plain-text tools and production-quality output you’ve come to rely on from R Markdown."
a-saleh 10y ago
I listened to a podcast about jupyter [1] some time ago, and remebered them talking about the separation between the kernel and the presentation in jupyter, and that in theory, it should be relatively easy to write your own frontend, that just sends to correct messages to the zmq :-) Afaik, hydrogen plugin for atom does this [2] And there is another plugin that just wraps the notebook to live inside of atom [3] [1] https://talkpython.fm/episodes/show/44/project-jupyter-and-ipython https://talkpython.fm/episodes/show/44/project-jupyter-and-i... [2] https://atom.io/packages/hydrogen https://atom.io/packages/hydrogen [3] https://github.com/jupyter/atom-notebook https://github.com/jupyter/atom-notebook
smortaz 10y ago
[msft] You are quite correct that the REPL/cell paradigm has its pluses & minuses. That's why the follow on (Jupyter Lab), is addressing many of these issues. Check out: https://github.com/jupyterlab/jupyterlab https://github.com/jupyterlab/jupyterlab

enricosada 10y ago

Awesome to see F# supported, based on OSS F# for Jupyter Notebooks (https://github.com/fsprojects/IfSharp https://github.com/fsprojects/IfSharp) work. It's really lovely when a tool written in another tech (Python there) can be used/extended with others stack/tech, because was written as language agnostic. That should be a rule for good design in oss tooling. Not starting using language specific communication, but extensibile from day0 in design (obv default language can be bundled)

nnq 10y ago
Seeing APIs that look like: Chart.Line(data) |> Chart.WithTitle("smth") |> ... ...makes anyone say "yuck" and avoiding F# for any exploratory work. And even after you understand how the pipe operator works and how useful it can be in other contexts. I mean, ugh... Even putting up with superfluous verbosity like `List.Map(myList)` instead of a `map(myList, ...)` or `myList.map(...)` because "that's how F#/OCaml does it, stfu" is ok, but this seems like purposeful obsfucation. No wonder R and Python are the only languages popular in ML. They are the only ones leading to sane readable code by people having other stuff to keep loaded in their head than language details. I mean, yeah, syntax that doesn't matter, unless it's so f annoying and ugly that you simply can't put up with it as much as you try!
- KirinDave 10y ago
  I'm... confused what you're upset about. Are you upset about the leading "Chart?" This is very, very easy stuff for functional programming. Most of the people I know in ML, talented ML folks doing data science within the org I work for to do exciting things... they actually aren't huge fans of the way Python does things. They're huge fans of the libraries Python has to speed up ML work. F# has a real lack there (surprisingly!). But like, saying that you like: Chart.Line(data).WithTitle("smth").render() as opposed to: Chart.Line(data) |> Chart.WithTitle("smdh") seems to me like 6 of one or half a dozen of the other. Especially since when you're reusing any given part of the pipeline, the ML way is alot more terse. And it's not like Python is devoid of hideous examples of poor language design. For example, self parameters. All we're told is some new age mysticism about how "explicit is better than implicit", but somehow that doesn't apply when we need higher order functions and we're using private function with lambda names to try and signal to readers that, "Sorry I needed 2 statements in my list comprehension and Python talks down to me like that guy from Timecube because of it." Why is explicitness valuable there but not on tuple construction? And it's not like Python doesn't make you arbitrarily choose between List.function and list.method with no seeming decisions to make. Which is not to say Python is especially bad. It is to say that you may have normalized Python so much that you forget all computer languages are somewhat arbitrary.

sixhobbits 10y ago

This looks really nice. I've always hated how buggy the free hosted Jupyter notebook services are, and setting up a remote server yourself is definitely not a one-click experience. Surprised to see how unrestricted this is (for now anyway). They'll probably see some abuse of the resources soon and add more restrictions. The "etc" from the restrictions section of the faq is pretty broad. "Usage should be limited to learning, research, general computing, etc."

chupapuma 10y ago
Thanks sixhobbits. Our goal isn't to restrict you if it isn't required. We do need to maintain the right to stop people from abusing this and make sure there is room on the service for multiple users. Aside from that you are basically free to party on :) - Azure Notebooks Dev

tonyedgecombe 10y ago

Yet another product where I haven't got a clue what it is after reading the front page.

Senderman 10y ago
I had the same problem; This cleared it up: http://jupyter.org http://jupyter.org
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- Pigo 10y ago
  I actually thought this was some kind of laptop for awhile, even after reading much of the front page. I googled Jupyter Notebook after a few context clues finally tipped me off. I just thought I was being dense, though.
smortaz 10y ago
[msft] Yes, we should improve the FP, especially for those who aren't familiar with Jupyter. Meanwhile, I hope this answers a few q's: https://notebooks.azure.com/faq https://notebooks.azure.com/faq

askvictor 10y ago

And today I was just about to spin up a jupyterhub server for my class...

smortaz 10y ago
[msft] Feel free to use it for your class askvictor & let us know ushow it does and how we can improve the service! For a sample course that was taught for ~400 students this fall, see: https://notebooks.azure.com/library/CUED-IA-Computing-Michaelmas https://notebooks.azure.com/library/CUED-IA-Computing-Michae...
- askvictor 10y ago
  I certainly will; this couldn't have dropped at a better time!

pjmlp 10y ago

Great to see F# on the samples list.

hatmatrix 10y ago

Is this just a hosting solution for Jupyter Notebooks? Or does it add something to the standard Jupyter Notebooks?

rahrahrah 10y ago
I'd like to hear an answer to this as well.
rickycook 10y ago
it seems to have forking, and allows you to execute the code on the back end so kind of a learning environment, because you can have people fork something like a ML notebook and play around with the different parameters
smortaz 10y ago
Hi hatmatrix - Currently it's primarily a hosted jupyter service - you can view with no login, or create/run if you login. It does not modify Jupyter itself in any significant way. We hope to add various features in the coming year. In its current form it can be used as a scratchpad, for classes, webinars, conferences, etc. where you have say 100+ ppl that quickly need to follow a tutorial without spending time on installation (it has Anaconda sitting underneath Python).
KirinDave 10y ago
Just a note, if you have F# you can install Mbrace. Which means you can actually split workflows arbitrarily from inside the notebook. That's really, really powerful.

zargath 10y ago

just small bug 1: Click "sign in". 2: Choose account I want to signin with 3: Click "cancel". 4: I get "500, Runtime Error" without custom error page. Anyway, looks interresting

chupapuma 10y ago
I filed a bug for you on our GitHub issue tracker. Thanks! https://github.com/Microsoft/AzureNotebooks/issues/20 https://github.com/Microsoft/AzureNotebooks/issues/20

JayOtter 10y ago

Or, if you prefer your interactive notebooks not to rely on a backend service: http://www.joelotter.com/kajero/ http://www.joelotter.com/kajero/

anc84 10y ago
That only works with JavaScript though or am I overlooking something?
- JayOtter 10y ago
  Currently, yeah, just JS. It's aimed more at non-technical folks - the "clever graphing" stuff should work without writing much code, if any.
  - Sean1708 10y ago
    > Currently, yeah, just JS. How do they plan to make it support multiple languages without having a backend service?
    - jsjohnst 10y ago
      There are a number of projects for transpiling X language into JavaScript. Most aren't super robust, but generally good enough for basic purposes. I feel once WebAssembly gets more steam, this will get even more robust. Not claiming this is a good solution, but definitely would be one possible route.

nickcw 10y ago

I've been experimenting with Jupyter notebooks recently so I thought I'd try uploading one I made which solves a wooden puzzle. It seemed to work just fine! https://notebooks.azure.com/library/puzzles https://notebooks.azure.com/library/puzzles I had to host the images in the notebook elsewhere rather than upload them with the notebook. It looks like that is possible but then I'd have to grapple with Azure blobs...

arethuza 10y ago
Working with Azure Storage Blobs is pretty straightforward - you can use the cross platform azure CLI application or use the Azure Storage Explorer application (which appears to be cross-platform as well in its latest form): http://storageexplorer.com/ http://storageexplorer.com/
- Pigo 10y ago
  I've been using the linux version for a couple months now, and it's a truck ton better than exploring through VS. I'm still waiting for it to support tabs, or any other multi-tasking interface. That's sort of a pain.
  - viggity 10y ago
    for those on windows and don't mind dropping a little $, I've been relatively happy with CloudXPlorer http://clumsyleaf.com/products/cloudxplorer http://clumsyleaf.com/products/cloudxplorer for browsing blobs. Has most of the features I care about TableXPlorer (for Azure Table Storage is decent too)
AdamSC1 10y ago
Pretty surprised at this as well. But, given you know this requirement now, is it safe to assume that if you embed remote images in your notebooks in future and upload them you'll have no issue? (i.e. it's not stripping them out and making you manually re-embed them each time if they aren't an Azure blob?)
euroclydon 10y ago

anc84 10y ago

Is it possible to share them publically, without the need for a Microsoft account for the user?

elsen 10y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13104807 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13104807 Click on the eye icon. You won't be able to run the notebook code, which would be a surprising thing to allow without some sort of authentication.
- anc84 10y ago
  That's a shame, I was hoping to be able to use these for interactive learning. Requiring signup is a showstopper for me. :(
  - MikusR 10y ago
    If requiring signup is a showstopper how are you posting on HN?
    - jsjohnst 10y ago
      Having taught after school programs for kids, it definitely is a barrier to entry. I'd not say it's a show stopper, but it's definitely a hassle. Even more relevant when the folks needing to sign up, "can't" easily (due to COPPA).
      - smortaz 10y ago
        [msft] Understood. Note that you can view notebooks w/o login. If you want a truly no login experience, try the awesome https://tmpnb.org https://tmpnb.org service. But note that these are temporary (tmp-nb...) and will go away. The login we require is to show you your notebooks next time you're back. If your school has office365 the existing creds should just work.

cbHXBY1D 10y ago

The "Import from Dropbox" feature is currently broken. Shame because it would be useful for data scientists...

chupapuma 10y ago
Thanks for the feedback cbHXBY1D. We discovered this having issues just a bit back. We have some devs looking at it now and hopefully can have it up and running soon. If this is blocking you, there are libs to use dropbox throuhg python: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/dropbox https://pypi.python.org/pypi/dropbox -Azure Notebooks Dev

AdamSC1 10y ago

I am a huge fan of Jupyter notebooks, the idea of being able to run my code easily alongside natural prose is crucial when telling the story of data. But, Jupyter faces most of it's challenges in the word-editor part of their product rather than in the code part. I'd love to see a partnership between them and the Eve programming language (http://witheve.com/ http://witheve.com/) who have absolutely mastered the IDE interface in early renditions of their product. I know a lot of people are against the concept of Eve from a purist perspective of code not needing to be humanized. But, one of the common goals in data is to communicate insights and solutions through visually crafted and accessible stories. I think there is still a long way we can come in that.

dobin 10y ago

Pretty interesting as a tool to learn Python or other things. I'm intrigued. I'm doing something similar with exploit development learning, but with a javascript based terminal and linux containers, and a markdown writeup (https://exploit.courses https://exploit.courses for anyone interested). But the close interaction of code and text in Jupyter is much more advanced, and useful :-)

FLGMwt 10y ago

Supported languages are: Python (2/3), R, F#

bargl 10y ago

OK this is freaking awesome. I've been working on some Machine Learning courses and they use Jupyter. I have the issue where whenever I switch computers I have to sync files and all that jazz. I'm so excited about this tool I can't even contain myself.

mrmondo 10y ago

Sorry to sound cynical but haven't they taken something that's existed for a long time and spent money on marketing it to add / repair value to their brand? It feels a little obvious to me to be honest?

wyldfire 10y ago
I suppose it's publicly hosted which might be rare or totally new. TBH the most frustrating thing is that unlike github's notebook hosting you need to login just to view the content. And for some reason the back button doesn't work once you encounter the login page. That's enough to make me want to stay away.
- chupapuma 10y ago
  Thanks for the feedback wyldfire. I am a dev on Azure Notebooks and wanted to mention we do allow viewing the content without login. However, to be in an executable context (jupyter) we require login. Our samples, in order to avoid extra clicks, take you straight into an executable environment. Any notebook can be opened in an html view: https://notebooks.azure.com/library/fsharp/html/FSharp%20for%20Azure%20Notebooks.ipynb https://notebooks.azure.com/library/fsharp/html/FSharp%20for... It sounds like you would like being able to view those more easily without logging in? Thanks! Chris
  - wyldfire 10y ago
    Thanks for being so responsive, Chris. I think that the 'view notebook' [eye icon] is too out-of-the-way to notice. IMO a design that might be less surprising would be for clicking on the name of the notebook to take you to the read-only view of the notebook. From there you could click on something that would promote it to an executable/editable view and login if necessary. But the broken back button on login page is a real bummer. EDIT either it was my imagination to begin with or it's already fixed because I tried it again and the back button appears to work correctly.
KirinDave 10y ago
Actually, this is somewhat surprising. It's taking what many, MANY data scientists and analysts are actually using day-to-day and making it point-and-click to start in the cloud. You can set these things up in AWS and GCE, but it requires a lot more work. Here is my top google hit for setting things up on AWS, from a relatively recent and maintained repository: https://gist.github.com/iamatypeofwalrus/5183133 https://gist.github.com/iamatypeofwalrus/5183133 Many data scientists just run their notebooks locally. Few have the luxury of Data Science Engineers on hand to help them through the complex world of provisioning and maintaining servers, even in this canned AWS world where spark clusters unfold themselves in EMR. Azure is absolutely full of "here is a canned solution for _insert common engineer task with open source focus here_" buttons and it's really quite great as a result. Also: Azure is doing a very good job of making it difficult to have a default-insecure instance. You don't make choices about encryption-at-rest, for example. That's forced on you. There is a lot more tooling around sharing accounts and giving users minimal ACLs rather than just doing the simple thing in AWS or GCE and giving out power user accounts. It's simple stuff, of course, but this simple stuff is the simple stuff AWS has elected not to do, so...

dandare 10y ago

I have not visited any Microsoft property for some time now and I have this strange feeling about the UX. Sadly I can not say if it is my deeply rooted aversion against everything Microsoft or if the UX is really odd.

r3bl 10y ago
It is very odd-looking. And it's really slow. It took me 55 seconds to load the page (42 of which went into downloading a 6 MB large GIF). 40+ requests. And it doesn't seem like a slow Internet problem at all.
- smortaz 10y ago
  [msft] Guilty as charged. The GIF will be gone soon. Though it loads in < 1 sec for me (~20Mbps). Thanks!
julienchastang 10y ago
I think your impressions of Microsoft are out-of-date. We've been successfully using Azure resources through "Azure for Research" grants. My world, is the world of Linux VMs, Docker, and OSS and I find Azure to be a good fit for our research needs. (I never touch any Windows OS, if that's what you are worried about.)
TallGuyShort 10y ago
I was in a similar situation a short time ago. Although I found it required a lot of screen space to work well, it could be a little slow, and it took some getting used to, it really grew on me. The hierarchical drill-down was really nice once you had a lot of different types of resources. I like AWS' interface, but sometimes I miss the feel of that navigation...
chupapuma 10y ago
Hi dandare. I am a dev on Azure Notebooks at Microsoft and can tell you that our team also delivers Python Tools for Visual Studio, Azure SDK for Python, R Tools for Visual Studio, and previously Node.js Tools for Visual Studio. The UX was not done in any way to feel like something else. We tried to design something that worked well for Jupyter users as well as looked nice and was usable. That being said, our teams strengths are not in UX by far. We are starting to work with designers to improve the "dev-UI"" we currently have. If you have any more feedback you would like to share we would love to hear it. There is a public tracker at https://github.com/microsoft/azurenotebooks https://github.com/microsoft/azurenotebooks and an email that goes to the team at nbhelp@microsoft.com

karl42 10y ago

There's also https://wakari.io/ https://wakari.io/ by continuum analytics. Can anyone summarize the differences?

smortaz 10y ago
[msft] Wakari is a more complete product from our partners at Continuum.io (we use their Anaconda distro for Azure Notebooks). We have various improvements planned & hope to reach parity soon!

tedmiston 10y ago

This is an awesome offering from MS. I'm not sure I understand this bit though — by "data" do they mean they'll delete a notebook not accesssed for 60 days? > Storage: We reserve the right to remove your data from our storage after 60 days of inactivity to avoid storing unused/abandoned user data

smortaz 10y ago
[msft] Proper data support is coming. I believe it's meant as: if you upload a ton of data & seem to have abandoned it, it'll eventually go away. Admittedly vague, will be made more crisp in the faq. Thanks!
chupapuma 10y ago
If you don't access your account for 60 days we reserve the right to remove your data (currently Notebooks but eventually notebooks, csv files, etc). This is to avoid us wasting storage on users that aren't actually using the service. As we are still new, we haven't started deleting files yet, but we wanted to be sure to have a policy for handling this upfront and not decide when there was a problem later and then start destroying content without any sort of notice. Thanks! -Azure Notebooks Dev

smortaz 10y ago

Hi folks - Thanks for taking a look at Azure notebooks. Here's some background info: What is it? It's an offshoot of Azure ML Studio which has Jupyter support. We asked the powers that be if we could also instantiate it also as a free service - "yes" was the answer. Who is it aimed at? Students, faculty, casual users, folks that want to give webinars, classrooms, etc & want to skip software install headaches. What does it support? Currently R, Py2, Py3, F#. Python is backed by the Anaconda distro. More kernels will be added based on user feedback. Environment runs on Linux/docker. Is it free? Yes. I need an account? Not to view content (a la nbviewer). To run, create notebooks, etc. you need a Microsoft account (xbox, outlook, hotmail, ...). Sample notebook to view (click on the eyeball): https://notebooks.azure.com/library/LIGOOpenScienceCenter https://notebooks.azure.com/library/LIGOOpenScienceCenter I don't like the UI! We are admittedly not UI people and are grateful to our summer intern for the current UI! Please send feedback to nbhelp@microsoft.com and we'll improve it! [EDIT: additions:] Can I get a bash prompt, install linux pkgs? Yes! In Jupyter, you can click on Terminal & you are in bash (ubuntu). Can I use pip, install.packages(), nuget, ... ? In Python/R/F#, you can use each environment's pkg mgr to install pkgs. EG "!pip install pkg", install.packages("ggplot2"), etc. See Py examples here: https://notebooks.azure.com/library/Intro_To_CNTK https://notebooks.azure.com/library/Intro_To_CNTK Is my environments saved? Currently, your notebooks are saved based on your login. Proper data, load github repo, etc. support is coming. For a bit more info, please view the faq: https://notebooks.azure.com/faq https://notebooks.azure.com/faq Thanks! [msft]

baldfat 10y ago
> Thanks! [msft] No thank you! I have been running a server on my own server at home, but this has so many awesome possibilities. I can see this as my go to for introducing Python or R in the near future.
hedgehog 10y ago
Are there plans to add GPU support?
- smortaz 10y ago
  [msft] Yes! Azure N-Series was announced recently and we hope to make it an option (HW selection in general). Whether it'll be free or not is above my pay grade. Would be nice to have a free tier at least (time/size).

reacharavindh 10y ago

Did not expect this to happen with Microsoft. Giving away access to a public Jupyter Server (open source project) Running it in Linux (Ubuntu) and letting users have a play with it. I for one am super happy to play with it however long this lasts. Some info so far. !free -h total used free shared buff/cache available Mem: 55G 7.5G 26G 70M 21G 44G Swap: 99G 0B 99G !uname -a Linux nbserver 4.4.0-51-generic #72-Ubuntu SMP Thu Nov 24 18:29:54 UTC 2016 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux Look! I can even install stuff I want from pip... !pip install terminaltables Collecting terminaltables Downloading terminaltables-3.1.0.tar.gz Building wheels for collected packages: terminaltables Running setup.py bdist_wheel for terminaltables ... - \ done Stored in directory: /home/nbuser/.cache/pip/wheels/96/0c/9a/0ec2bcad2ac1fb1d0e4695879386460cec1a947cd7413d1b17 Successfully built terminaltables Installing collected packages: terminaltables Successfully installed terminaltables-3.1.0 You are using pip version 8.1.2, however version 9.0.1 is available. You should consider upgrading via the 'pip install --upgrade pip' command.

smortaz 10y ago
[msft] :). Interestingly enough, the decision to use linux/docker was a no-brainer. I know from the outside it might seem odd, but these days, the attitude (and rightly so) is: use the language/stack/OS/toolchain/etc. you need to get your job done. I think you'll see an explosion of Linux/Python/Java/Go/... internally & externally on Azure. Data point - our team (Python), wanted to hold a "Python day @ msft" event to teach/inform internal teams on the language/ecosystem. We were hoping maybe 50..100 would show up, if lucky. A thousand and twenty one people showed up! Another data point - the official Azure CLI was just rewritten in Python (win/macos/linux): https://github.com/Azure/azure-cli https://github.com/Azure/azure-cli Thanks!
- denfromufa 10y ago
  Maybe it runs on Linux because jupyterhub does not work on Windows, not even on Linux subsystem? Microsoft ported docker to Windows, please do the same with jupyterhub!

mmsmatt 10y ago

Clicked link from IE11. Got this: > "Internet Explorer is not supported by Jupyter: For best results use Microsoft Edge, Chrome, Firefox, or another modern browser." This makes me so happy - MS products leaving old browsers behind gives all web developers a ball and bat in the same fight.

asadm 10y ago

This is amazing, I had set up a jupyter hub using some docker hacks to allow my students to access their own personal instance(running inside a new container) using github login. This might be a good low-cost alternative. Thanks Azure!

smortaz 10y ago
[msft] Awesome! Cambridge University (Dr Wells) just did that. Here's their notebook: https://notebooks.azure.com/library/CUED-IA-Computing-Michaelmas https://notebooks.azure.com/library/CUED-IA-Computing-Michae...

luzvioleta 10y ago

I use notebooks a lot, but with Julia. In any case, this is <3 amazing news !

smortaz 10y ago
+1 for Julia - Please kindly file a request on github: https://github.com/Microsoft/AzureNotebooks https://github.com/Microsoft/AzureNotebooks (user request > our wishes)
- luzvioleta 10y ago
  Hey ! It's already posted <3 https://github.com/Microsoft/AzureNotebooks/issues/4 https://github.com/Microsoft/AzureNotebooks/issues/4

closeparen 10y ago

One of my physics major friends uses a Chromebook (and a shitty Windows laptop he prefers not to deal with). I set up a DigitalOcean droplet for him to run Jupyter. One of the big problems is that it's not safe for him to share Jupyter notebooks by URL, since anyone to whom he discloses the web UI password gets remote code execution (exec and friends work). A professionally maintained, sufficiently sandboxed Jupyter environment could be awesome for people who want to work on and share Jupyter notebooks, but not be responsible for servers.

smortaz 10y ago
[msft] Agree 100%. Focus on science, not scaffolding maintenance. Sharing is basic now (ie unlisted-URL), but proper support (public/private/ro/etc) is coming soon.
simonbyrne 10y ago
Check out https://juliabox.com/ https://juliabox.com/, which despite the name also supports Python. (Disclaimer: service is run by my employer)
- closeparen 10y ago
  Your CSS is very broken in Chrome, would love to check it out though.
  - simonbyrne 10y ago
    I don't have any issues with Chrome: would you mind sending me a screenshot (simonbyrne@gmail.com)?
    - closeparen 10y ago
      Working now, must've been a transient issue with where the CSS was hosted. Looks awesome!

fonnesbeck 10y ago

Seems like they did something to the notebook interface to make it more responsive on tablets. I usually cannot manipulate Jupyter notebooks from an iPad, but I can here. Is this just a MS modification?

stcredzero 10y ago

This looks like a Microsoft hosted cloud based "Dynabook." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynabook https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynabook Is that what it basically is?

smortaz 10y ago
[msft] Not sure. It's a hosted Jupyter Notebook service. A Notebook here is a polyglot, browser based, REPL on steroids. See: http://jupyter.org http://jupyter.org Sample notebooks (html captures of runnable notebooks): https://nbviewer.jupyter.org/ https://nbviewer.jupyter.org/
- stcredzero 10y ago
  A Notebook here is a polyglot, browser based, REPL on steroids. Smalltalk is somewhat of a primitive browser and very much a REPL on steroids. Instead of being polyglot from the standpoint of supporting multiple languages, Smalltalk was designed to be usable by people from grade school students up through researchers. (It largely succeeded in that goal, but failed in that it didn't attain enough popularity with mainstream engineers/programmers.) Some of the educational uses of Squeak Smalltalk are very much in the same vein.

rem1313 10y ago

Excited! Let's load some data and try it out! Ok, let's use OneDrive to load data. Where is that option? Nvm, let's use Dropbox instead. Does not work "Something went wrong. Please refresh the page." Maybe Azure storage? Trying to sign-up, filled sign-up form, verified account via SMS, entered CC data. Nope! "Cannot proceed with signup due to issue with your account. Contact support". (tried multiple times) Contacting support.. creating incident, describing the issue. When trying to attach screenshot I get "The file upload service server is not available at this time. Wait a few minutes and then try it again." Seriously, Microsoft??

smortaz 10y ago
[msft] RE Dropbox - Very sorry about that :(. We discovered an issue earlier and are feverishly looking at fixing it. Will remove the UI until it is fixed. Meanwhile you can !curl in data among other approaches. RE Storage/CC sign up. I'll locate someone in that group & reply back.
- rem1313 10y ago
  Thanks! Somebody got back to me and apparently prepaid CC are not supported

vaibhavsagar 10y ago

This is very similar to Sage Math Cloud: https://cloud.sagemath.com/ https://cloud.sagemath.com/

piec 10y ago

You can reach the jupyterlab[1] ui using that kind of url: https://notebooks.azure.com/n/<...>/lab https://notebooks.azure.com/n/<...>/lab (i.e. replace /tree with /lab) [1] https://github.com/jupyterlab/jupyterlab https://github.com/jupyterlab/jupyterlab

todd8 10y ago

Jupiter is a great project for data scientists. Here is a one sentence explanation from jupyter.org: "The Jupyter Notebook is a web application that allows you to create and share documents that contain live code, equations, visualizations and explanatory text."