This looks very similar to LiveBook¹. It is purely Elixir/BEAM based, but is quite polished and seems like a perfect workflow tool that is also able to expose these workflows (simply called livebooks) as web apps that some functional, non-technical person can execute on his/her own.
Runme – Interactive Runbooks Built with Markdown
31–40 of 47 posts
Re: Runme – Interactive Runbooks Built with Markdown
#32Is that video on the homepage a Fiverr gig?
Re: Runme – Interactive Runbooks Built with Markdown
#33My company is investing heavily in interactive runbooks (their own impl) and while I kinda dislike the idea of runbooks in general this is a nice implementation. Interactive Runbooks exist in some sort of tech-debt limbo where you have enough time to write a nice little runbook but apparently not enough time to properly automate whatever the task is. Ideally automation is easy and all change flows through a SDLC and…
Runbooks are about eliminating toil incrementally.
If you or your team find there's some process that needs to be done regularly, you're right, it should be automated. But there are often barriers to doing that immediately, and you may not even agree on what all the steps are. Here's how you do it then:
1. Write the runbook.
2. Execute the runbook multiple times.
3. Modify and improve the runbook.
4. Automate parts of the runbook.
5. When the entire thing is automated, hook it up to a metric to run automatically.
6. Delete your manual runbook - keep this new piece of code documented with its history and steps of improvement and eventual automation.
This method means you get consistency of a method almost immediately, don't need to fight product to spend a ton of time on it (you can spend 30 minutes here and there on a single step), the team has better conversations about ad-hoc process, and you eventually automate it.
In my job we have to do code releases to customers. This means we take a repo, do some tidying up like removing internal comments, inline some dependencies, make sure the README is in good shape, then make sure several people are notified and can approve it.
I wrote a scrappy runbook with like 10 bullet points because this was being done really inconsistently. A month later it had been improved a ton by engineers with detailed command lines and roll back steps. Now they're starting to automate parts of it. We don't have explicit time for this, but we got a consistent process straight off the bat, engineer buy-in to the process and improving it, and bit by bit we will get to a point where it becomes a one-liner without us feeling we had to carve out a chunk of time specially for it.
What's not to like?
Re: Runme – Interactive Runbooks Built with Markdown
#34My company is investing heavily in interactive runbooks (their own impl) and while I kinda dislike the idea of runbooks in general this is a nice implementation. Interactive Runbooks exist in some sort of tech-debt limbo where you have enough time to write a nice little runbook but apparently not enough time to properly automate whatever the task is. Ideally automation is easy and all change flows through a SDLC and…
Runbooks are about eliminating toil incrementally. If you or your team find there's some process that needs to be done regularly, you're right, it should be automated. But there are often barriers to doing that immediately, and you may not even agree on what all the steps are. Here's how you do it then: 1. Write the runbook. 2. Execute the runbook multiple times. 3. Modify and improve the runbook. 4. Automate parts o…
I worked at Rundeck on the core engineering team through the PagerDuty acquisition. Left my job start of the year to bootstrap a reboot, StepWise, that embraces and leans into that iterative approach to automation.
We are looking for early adopters to try it out and give feedback soon here. Would love to get your thoughts; https://stepwisehq.com .
Re: Runme – Interactive Runbooks Built with Markdown
#35For those who don't know, Jupyter has a bash kernel: https://github.com/takluyver/bash_kernel And you can run Jupyter notebooks from the CLI with Ploomber: https://github.com/ploomber/ploomber
Also, often you don't need to save your Jupyter notebook in the unergonomical json format; instead save it as a script containing your code cells (and the markdown cells as comments). Thus you can run it directly from the command line in whatever language your notebook is, python, bash... To save notebooks as plain text files you pip install jupytext, and it magically works: jupyter will interpret your .py files as notebooks, and so on.
Re: Runme – Interactive Runbooks Built with Markdown
#36How is this better than actual Jupiter?
I wouldn't squirrel my documentation away in an ipynb file. So even though I'd like to use notebooks as runbooks, Jupyter just isn't the right solution for that. This could be a great tool for when you want to augment markdown documentation with runnable snippets. I really like this idea, it gives off literate programming[0] vibes. [0]: http://literateprogramming.com/
> I wouldn't squirrel my documentation away in an ipynb file.
This! ipynb files are a nightmare to deal with. Fortunately, you can use jupyter without ever seeing a .ipynb file, by storing your notebooks in a different format (e.g. as programs or as markdown files). Bonus points: you'll hear fewer complains from your local graybeards if they can edit and run notebooks from their favorite text editor.
Re: Runme – Interactive Runbooks Built with Markdown
#37This reminds me of a less-refined version of Moment.dev [1].
Re: Runme – Interactive Runbooks Built with Markdown
#38I keep trying to click the logo to play a video :)
Re: Runme – Interactive Runbooks Built with Markdown
#39My company is investing heavily in interactive runbooks (their own impl) and while I kinda dislike the idea of runbooks in general this is a nice implementation. Interactive Runbooks exist in some sort of tech-debt limbo where you have enough time to write a nice little runbook but apparently not enough time to properly automate whatever the task is. Ideally automation is easy and all change flows through a SDLC and…
> Interactive Runbooks exist in some sort of tech-debt limbo where you have enough time to write a nice little runbook but apparently not enough time to properly automate whatever the task is I think this is a really common place to fall into. Automating 100% of conditions is hard, but having a google-doc full of bash commands is kinda meh. One of my previous teams decided on a "Maintainer Lambda" which would help wi…
Sorry for off-topic, but was "runback" a typo? Because it happens to be a brand ... related to the sport of curling. Amazing coincidence if yes.
Re: Runme – Interactive Runbooks Built with Markdown
#40Is that video on the homepage a Fiverr gig?
Haha now that you mention it, sure does feel like it. I think the music plays a big part as to why