FA DEVELOPER version 1.1 introduces a new developer tool in the FA Platform, Notebooks. By embedding JupyterHub in the FA Platform, we can provide FA users easy access to Jupyter Notebooks within the same cloud infrastructure as the rest of the platform.
The FA Platform provides many built-in ways to access and analyze your data: you can query it, export it into Excel, run reports against it, and visualize it directly in our various applications.
But what if sometimes that isn’t enough: what if you want to perform more complex analyses such as Monte Carlo simulations? What if you wish to build machine learning models based on your data? What if you’d hope to combine data from FA’s APIs with other non-FA data sources? That’s where Notebooks shine.
Jupyter Notebooks allow you to perform various data analytics and manipulation tasks through on-the-fly scripting. That makes the technology ideal for exploratory data analytics, making it a very popular tool among data scientists.
Notebooks support dozens of programming languages, notably Python and R. You can read more about Jupyter Notebooks here.
Having access to Notebooks directly within the FA Platform is useful because:
- It removes the burden of running or hosting it yourself
- It minimizes latency: the embedded Notebooks run within the same network as the FA Platform, so calling FA APIs from Notebooks is fast
- It allows you to share and re-use Notebooks between users
- The embedded Notebooks have key Python data analytics libraries pre-installed
- Access is managed through your FA user/login, just like other FA Applications
(click the image to see it as a bigger version)
