Amit Rathi, Vinay Kakade Simplify DevOps with Executable Notebooks | JupyterCon 2023
Today, Jupyter Notebooks are mostly confined to science, research & education. But notebooks can provide organizations with a powerful general-purpose “executable documentation” platform. A solid use case for this is DevOps & more specifically, IT incident response.
Technology teams usually have an on-call rotation with static wiki-style documentation to guide the on-call engineer. Jupyter Notebooks can replace static documentation with executable notebooks. E.g. “fetch service logs” and “rollback last deployment” can simply mean executing a code cell that’s available alongside the markdown instructions.
What are the benefits of executable vs. static documentation for DevOps -
Quick e.g. “check DB latency” is 1-click notebook code cell execution to plot latency graph vs. going to a third-party UI in the middle of an incidence
Precise e.g. “promote read replica to master” can mean a series of steps & possibility of human error; codifying the steps in advance removes ambiguity & results in precise action.
“Executable documentation” is a simple yet powerful concept that can extend to other use cases such as - API documentation, developer onboarding, data visualization & reporting, scheduling routine tasks & so on. Think of it as executable GoogleDocs powered by Jupyter!
In this talk, we’d like to,
Introduce the concept of Jupyter powered “executable documentation” platform, particularly for DevOps and Incident Response,
Show a demo of how it’d work - ( • API Latency Demo )
Talk about important challenges, and propose a way forward to make this a mainstream application of Jupyter notebooks.