How to properly manage Azure Notebooks Kernels and Conda Environments
What is Conda?
It’s an open source package management system and environment management system that allows Data Scientists and ML Engineers to create Virtual Environments, Install Packages, etc.
This is very important because as Data Scientists we need to be able to execute our code when it goes to UAT, PROD. With Conda, we can export the environments configuration which will allow ML Engineers to properly set up environments for moving from DEV to UAT to PRODUCTION.
What is a Conda Environment?
A conda environment is a directory that contains a specific collection of conda packages that you have installed. For example, you may have one environment with NumPy 1.7 and its dependencies, and another environment with NumPy 1.6 for legacy testing. If you change one environment, your other environments are not affected. You can easily “activate or deactivate” (not in a notebook cell) environments, which is how you switch between them. You can also share your environment with someone by giving them a copy of your environment.yaml file.
What is an Ipython kernel?
The IPython kernel is the Python execution backend for Jupyter.
