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?
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
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...
Our 1st interaction with the awesome Jupyter team was enabling it in Visual Studio / Python:
https://github.com/Microsoft/PTVS/wiki/Using-IPython-with-PT...
After that we loved the project (and the team) so much that we donated a $100,000 for furthering development. They used the funds to hire a dev & help improve the Jupyter for all platforms.
Since then we've put Jupyter in Azure ML studio which combines a drag/drop ML canvas with that of a notebook. You can use it to analyze your data / build models /deploy to Azure.
As an offshoot of the above project, we wanted to give something back to the community, so we figured we'd instantiate it as a separate notebook-centric offering for dabblers, students, faculty, demoers, webinar/seminar speakers, etc.
And by "we", I mean a small group in Microsoft who cooked up the idea - if it turns out to be useful, we'll keep it going. If it's not, we'll shut it off. So far thought it looks like it's hit a chord - thousands of notebooks have been created just in the past month. Various schools are using it to teach cs101, eng101 courses, people are using it to demo their products/services (an executable doc page vs a static one), ...
Beyond this initial offering, we hope to add a suite of features both around and inside Jupyter. For example, we hope to be working w the core team to add debugging/profiling support soon. We also hope that the VSCode editor will be integrated for the JupyterLab environment. We'd love to hear your ideas!
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.
Any notebook can be opened in an html view: 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
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.