is a fantastic tool for data exploration. It . While is great for data science, I’m going to demonstrate the use of for a completely different use case: or simply put, . Jupyter Notebook combines markdown text, executable code, and output all inside a single document served in a browser Jupyter Notebook DevOps Runbook a way to respond quickly to system outages Problem Imagine you are spending an evening with your loved one and suddenly see a flurry of slack/pager alerts about your API latency climbing up. It’s all downhill from there. You get online and check all usual suspects: . You jump from terminal to AWS console to NewRelic to conference call and what not. Let’s just say the whole experience is stressful until you find and fix the issue. recent deployments, dependent services, load balancer, incoming traffic, database and so on More matured organisations maintain runbooks for incident response. Runbook outlines the steps to be followed and takes the guess work out of debugging. First, let’s see some challenges with current form of runbooks: You need to manually execute each step, no automation Unless very well written, there can be ambiguity/confusion in following instructions It’s quite an effort to get everybody onboard to keep the runbooks up to date Solution To tackle some of these problems I am proposing use of Jupyter Notebooks for writing runbooks. Here’s how your API latency debugging session might look like inside a Notebook environment (please watch this video in full screen mode, original if needed). youtube link Incident response with Jupyter Notebook You can . pull in graphs, check deployment times, rollback changes, run SQL queries, shell scripts, SSH all from within Notebook Benefits Here are some benefits of maintaining your runbooks in executable Notebook format. Less confusion. Code is much more deterministic than instructions written in English. Reduces the incident time & impact. On-call responds faster with code required to investigate/fix an issue at her fingertip. Automate at your own pace. Since Notebook supports markdown, it’s possible to just import existing runbooks as is & automate a few steps every sprint. Better collaboration. It provides a first class platform for sharing all the tribal knowledge and local scripts that developers keep to combat an issue. There’s real power when we combine individual steps to build more complex logic. Following is possible today. It’s a step towards self healing system. Challenges Executable Notebook format is promising but here are some challenges with current Jupyter implementation. Typical Jupyter installation is single user local setup requiring the Jupyter server to be running locally. There’s no easy way to share Notebooks. could have been a good choice but it’s hosted on Google servers. The Notebook server needs to be self hosted for the code to have access to all the infrastructure within our VPC. Google Colaboratory Any infrastructure code will require credentials, ssh keys etc. We need a way to share them safely & not just stick it everywhere in the Notebook code snippets. I’m building , a platform that tackles these challenges & provides an easy way to write and share executable runbooks within team. provide a complete overview of Nurtch capabilities and how-to’s. what do you think of this approach to managing runbooks. Nurtch Docs Let me know View all posts by Amit Rathi Originally published at blog.amirathi.com on March 27, 2018.

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