As disclaimer/context, am a dev on the Azure hosted Jupyter Notebooks product,
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]
wow, a link to my blog (that second link) made hackernews? that's exciting!
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?)
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.