Also I always thought notebooks would be a great devops tool, kind of like a super command line that has easily observable steps grouped in chunks and graphical feedback. No one else seems to think so though so maybe I'm wrong.
You're not wrong! (Or at the least, it's a topic that has come across our ears before, and is something I certainly agree with) Obviously I probably shouldn't go off spouting all the pipe dreams I have in this space, but given that I got my start doing Ops work and tried to keep an eye for things I might have liked back then, I can assure you there you're not alone.
I always saw the similarity foremost as a direct upgrade to the "runbooks"/"firefighting/deploy checklists" that crop up all too often.
Have you seen Application Insights Workbooks [0]? Basically you can have interactive notebooks and run analytics queries against your telemetry, generate charts, add text cells, etc. It's picking up usage for investigating outages, e.g., have a Workbook with a query that looks at your dependency calls and determine what service is failing + produce a visualization.
Workbooks don't actually execute any external actions, though. It's solely an analysis tool. Runbooks skew the other direction, they are for executing scripts (more or less).
Jupyter/python seems to fit in a nice gap where this could be bridged, especially with the level of existing python support from azure sdk + cli.
PS: a dev from Workbooks has seen Azure Notebooks, and was curious a while back about how he could integrate the functionality [1]
[0]: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/application-insights/... [1]: http://blog.my-is300.com/2017/06/what-i-work-on-application-...
Anyway, yeah, workbooks in appinsights is almost like notebooks for non-programmers? kinda? you string together markdown, parameters, and analytics queries (and very soon metrics across more of azure) into reports. But the parameters stuff lets you do more interactive things to hide/show sections now. i really need to do a new blog post about all the new stuff that's in there that wasn't last june!
i've prototyped some stuff to export an AI workbook to an azure/jupyter notebook, as there's some support for querying analytics already from a python package. there just hasn't been enough demand for it so far (not as much as we expected, anyway?)
I thought this video was pretty cool personally!
Just saw that you are CEO of GitLab. Good job making your runbooks public [1]. I converted one of your runbook into an executable notebook to convey my point. Check the before/after screenshot here: https://blog.amirathi.com/2018/03/27/codify-infra-runbooks-w...
You should consider using Nurtch :)
More generally, there is %%script <x>, which executes the cell using <x>.
0: http://ipython.readthedocs.io/en/stable/interactive/magics.h...
BUT. The core concept is great. We made a form more focused on interactive investigation, so you can jump from an alert in a dashboard into a rich & interactive visual session with pre-wrangled data: https://youtu.be/B3ZZWx9WUEk?t=1m32s . Depending on what you see, can easily pull in more data, or refine what's there. And agreed, I think it'd be fun to try in big devops/netops scenarios!
It's a middle ground between literate programming and a traditional IDE and there is nothing like that aimed at the ops space where it would actually be quite valuable.
1: http://howardism.org/Technical/Emacs/literate-devops.html