66: Inside Bento - Serverless Jupyter Notebooks at Meta
Aug 30, 2024
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Join Steve, a Jupyter expert from Meta, as he reveals the exciting features of Bento, Meta's customized Jupyter Notebooks. Learn how serverless capabilities and WebAssembly enhance performance and efficiency. Steve discusses innovative tools like scheduled notebooks, easier data integration from Google Sheets, and the upcoming multi-language support. Discover how Bento streamlines data analytics and fosters collaboration among engineers and data scientists while integrating AI to assist users. Get a glimpse of what's next for these groundbreaking tools!
Bento enables seamless collaboration by allowing internal users to share Jupyter Notebooks easily while maintaining strict privacy controls for data access.
The platform's innovative serverless execution through WebAssembly enhances user experience by allowing immediate access to data analysis without traditional computing complexities.
Deep dives
Overview of Bento and Jupyter Notebooks
Bento is an internal implementation of Jupyter Notebooks specifically designed for use within Meta, offering an interactive web-based platform where users can run Python code, execute data analyses, and train machine learning models. It integrates Meta-specific features to streamline the user experience, such as notebook sharing among colleagues and direct browser execution. Unlike standard Jupyter notebooks, Bento can run serverlessly using a WebAssembly version of Python, which significantly enhances accessibility and ease of use. This serverless approach facilitates immediate interaction with data and analysis without the complexities of traditional computing environments.
Target User Groups and Use Cases
Bento is utilized primarily by data scientists, data engineers, and software developers within Meta, supporting a variety of use cases ranging from data visualization to machine learning workflows. Data scientists often employ Bento for data analysis and visualization tasks, while machine learning engineers use it to streamline their machine learning processes. Additionally, software developers benefit from Bento's flexibility by extracting data through SQL and transforming it easily within the notebook environment. The platform's ability to bridge the gap between coding and analysis makes it an essential tool for professionals looking to quickly manipulate and visualize data.
Enhanced Collaboration and Sharing Features
One of the key innovations of Bento is its enhanced collaboration capabilities that simplify sharing notebooks among colleagues. Instead of managing files across different systems, users can directly share notebooks via unique identifiers within internal communication channels, making collaboration seamless. The platform incorporates strict privacy controls to ensure that only authorized users can access shared notebooks, providing fine-grained permissions for data access. This facilitates a more efficient workflow for teams as they can quickly distribute and discuss analyses or findings without navigating cumbersome sharing procedures.
Future Developments and Polyglot Support
Looking ahead, Bento is evolving to support multiple programming languages, allowing users to create polyglot notebooks that can integrate various languages such as Python, R, and Hack within a single environment. This feature aims to enhance versatility by letting users leverage the strengths of different languages for specific tasks without switching between different tools. Additionally, improvements in the serverless execution model will enable more efficient processing of lightweight workloads through a unified interface. With these enhancements, Bento is set to become an even more powerful productivity tool for data professionals at Meta.
Bento is Meta’s internal distribution of Jupyter Notebooks, an open-source web-based computing platform. Host Pascal is joined by Steve who worked with his team on building many features on top of Jupyter, including scheduled notebooks, sharing with colleagues and running notebooks without a remote server component by leveraging Webassembly in the browser.