Python in Microsoft Azure?
.NET is a grand old daddy now given .NET was first launched circa 2000. So when we discuss exciting new technology or software Microsoft isn't exactly the first thing that comes to mind.
So I was pleasantly surprised to read about Microsoft's foray into the Python space, especially the free Jupyter notebooks on Azure. As those of you who have wrangled with Jupyter know, you need to install anaconda , then Jupyter notebook and better get you memory upgrade. Otherwise everything crawls to a halt.
If you are into Python and haven't tried the notebooks on Azure yet, you should. Neat thing about Azure notebooks is it runs on (what else) Azure cloud and it is completely browser based. No more heavy footprint on your old laptop!
Below is an example of Jupyter notebooks in Azure in action; The python snippet reads a csv file containing some search analytics data from YouTube. In this simple example, the search is looking for YouTube videos that contain 'ca.gov'. YouTube provides developer API's and sample snippets in several languages including Python. I used the API to generate a .CSV file with search results, then used matplotlib library to generate bar charts. The horizontal bar chart show below depicts view counts for each of the top videos in the search result.
%matplotlib inline
import pandas as pd
from matplotlib import pyplot as plt
import numpy as np
df = pd.read_csv('Youtube_video_result.csv')
# Draw a graph with pandas
ax = df.sort_values(by='viewCount', ascending=True).head(10)[['title', 'viewCount']].plot(kind='Barh',\
x='title', y='viewCount',title ='view counts')
Azure notebooks are free, you don't need a Azure subscription. You can register and login to notebooks.azure.com using any of your Microsoft ID's: xxx@gmail.com,xxx@outlook.com, xxx@Xbox.com, etc.
