Talks - Koushik Krishnan: Rest Easy with Jupyrest: Deploy notebooks as web services

Jupyrest is a library that converts Jupyter notebooks into REST APIs, developed at Microsoft and now open source

Key components of a notebook function:

• Input schema (parameters)
• Output schema
• Unique identifier
• Configuration file matching notebook name

Main use cases:

• Incident response automation
• Runbook automation
• Converting script directories into maintainable services
• Automated reporting
• Custom dashboards

Benefits:

• Preserves notebook’s visual elements (charts, graphs, tables)
• Provides execution logs and debugging information
• No need to rewrite notebooks for production
• Works with standard JSON schemas
• Supports Python objects as input/output

Deployment options:

• Fast API for local development
• Azure Functions for serverless deployment
• Compatible with most serverless platforms

Limitations:

• Not suitable for high-performance/low-latency services
• Cannot support interactive features requiring running kernel
• Notebooks may take longer to execute
• Not ideal for real-time applications

Implementation details:

• Injects code cells with input parameters
• Converts JSON input into Python code
• Generates HTML execution reports
• Provides error handling and validation
• Supports multiple notebook routing

Production ready:

• In use at Microsoft since 2020
• MIT licensed
• Supports multiple deployment environments
• Handles monitoring and telemetry automatically