
Using Jupyter Notebooks for SysAdmin, CloudOps and DevOps Workflows - rb808
http://www.informaticslab.co.uk/process/2017/05/08/jupyter-for-sysadmin-devops-cloudops-workflows.html
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rb808
I really like this idea - notebooks are a nice hybrid between scripts and
command lines.

I've seen a few mentions around the web about people talking but no real
usage. Has anyone tried and succeeded or failed?

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existencebox
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...](https://notebooks.azure.com/Microsoft/libraries/samples/html/Creation%20and%20Deployment%20of%20an%20Azure%20ML%20Web%20Service.ipynb)

[2]
[https://notebooks.azure.com/Microsoft/libraries/samples/html...](https://notebooks.azure.com/Microsoft/libraries/samples/html/Getting%20to%20your%20Data%20in%20Azure%20Notebooks.ipynb)

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rb808
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
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
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
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)

