3 ms·

Heavy disclaimer; I'm a dev for MS azure notebooks team, but even prior to this role (and largely WHY I joined the team) is that I'd been using the notebooks in

Heavy disclaimer; I'm a dev for MS azure notebooks team, but even prior to this role (and largely WHY I joined the team) is that I'd been using the notebooks in an analytics/devops role, managing dataset existence/movement/endpoint calls (the underlying work was rather mundane, forecasting/strategic analytics, textual analysis). From a purely infrastructural side, the potential of that fusion is a large reason why we include the azure management libs out of box in our notebooks offering. Even from a non-azure-specific perspective, I found it very nice to be able to do things like "Oh I'm running an existing analytics script on a new team's target DB, let me run the cell that creates a new set of tables and blobs for that novel flow" and have that all within the same workspace and UX. Perhaps obviously, it's not a replacement for all the sort of things you need ops scripts for, but of the class of "ad-hoc tasks"/"ops tasks relating heavily to the logical code" I found it made my life easier. (After writing this I went poking around to see if I could follow this up with "real examples"; we have one of those mixed-mode examples I mention above in our own docs ([1] and [2]); again let me echo the very "my own team" bias warning :) All of what I'm discussing can be accomplished with core Jupyter, in some form or another.) [1] https://notebooks.azure.com/Microsoft/libraries/samples/html/Creation%20and%20Deployment%20of%20an%20Azure%20ML%20Web%20Service.ipynb https://notebooks.azure.com/Microsoft/libraries/samples/html... [2] https://notebooks.azure.com/Microsoft/libraries/samples/html/Getting%20to%20your%20Data%20in%20Azure%20Notebooks.ipynb https://notebooks.azure.com/Microsoft/libraries/samples/html...

rb808 9y ago
Thanks its great to hear someone else using it successfully. Still I'd like some more stories before trying to set it up as our company standard.
- existencebox 9y ago
  Absolutely fair; I wouldn't do anything less myself :) If I may be somewhat mercenary and use the fact that I have you as a "testing the water" person hostage, what sort of stories/examples would be impactful to you? (Both as a MS employee and as a "I'd like to be better at understanding what moves the needle" in a general sense) I imagine "working, hardened proofs of concept and real e2e implementations" broadly, but if any scenarios/tech would stand out to you.
  - rb808 9y ago
    I need a solution that makes it easy for front line support people to support multiple server applications. A consistent way to start, stop, tail log file, run some commands and maybe deploy. Ideally I'd like to hear that many big organizations already use Jupyter or some product to do this. Doesn't sound like its the case though.
    - existencebox 9y ago
      From my perspective as someone who did ops for bigcos before I knew about jupyter: It's still a rather new tech. Runbooks, script libraries, CMSes, are still king for most sysop flows. I agree with and share your view of the promise that notebooks offer, but given the often lagging momentum of the biggest corps, I'd be surprised if one was already using a relatively new tech pervasively. (thus my "how do I motivate this change" question :P since I've certainly found value in it)

rb808 9y ago

Thanks its great to hear someone else using it successfully. Still I'd like some more stories before trying to set it up as our company standard.

existencebox 9y ago
Absolutely fair; I wouldn't do anything less myself :) If I may be somewhat mercenary and use the fact that I have you as a "testing the water" person hostage, what sort of stories/examples would be impactful to you? (Both as a MS employee and as a "I'd like to be better at understanding what moves the needle" in a general sense) I imagine "working, hardened proofs of concept and real e2e implementations" broadly, but if any scenarios/tech would stand out to you.
- rb808 9y ago
  I need a solution that makes it easy for front line support people to support multiple server applications. A consistent way to start, stop, tail log file, run some commands and maybe deploy. Ideally I'd like to hear that many big organizations already use Jupyter or some product to do this. Doesn't sound like its the case though.
  - existencebox 9y ago
    From my perspective as someone who did ops for bigcos before I knew about jupyter: It's still a rather new tech. Runbooks, script libraries, CMSes, are still king for most sysop flows. I agree with and share your view of the promise that notebooks offer, but given the often lagging momentum of the biggest corps, I'd be surprised if one was already using a relatively new tech pervasively. (thus my "how do I motivate this change" question :P since I've certainly found value in it)