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Posted on Jun 8 • Originally published at towardsdev.com on May 5

Deploy Open Notebook on Azure: A Complete Step-by-Step Guide to Launch Your AI Podcast Creator

#cloud #microsoftazure #artificialintelligen #opennotebook

As AI-powered tools continue to reshape how we consume and interact with information, Open Notebook — The AI Podcast Creator stands out as a powerful, privacy-first solution for transforming notes, PDFs, and links into engaging audio content.

But what truly makes Open Notebook compelling is its self-hosted flexibility. Instead of relying entirely on third-party APIs, you can deploy it on your own infrastructure — giving you full control over performance, cost, and data privacy.

In this guide, we’ll walk you through a complete step-by-step process to deploy Open Notebook on Microsoft Azure using a pre-configured Virtual Machine from the Azure Marketplace. Whether you’re a developer, researcher, or startup building AI-powered workflows, this tutorial will help you get up and running quickly.

By the end of this guide, you’ll have:

A fully deployed Open Notebook instance on Azure
Access to its web interface
Configured AI models (including local Ollama models)
Your own AI-powered podcast creation environment

Let’s get started.

Step-by-Step Guide

Open Open Notebook — The AI Podcast creator VM listing on Azure Marketplace.

Click on Get It Now

It will take you to the Product details page. Click on Create.

Select a Resource group for your virtual machine
Select a Region where you want to launch the VM(such as East US)

Note: If you see the error message “This image is not compatible with selected security type. To keep trusted launch virtual machines, select a compatible image. Otherwise, change your security type back to Standard” below the Image name, as shown in the screenshot below, then please change the Security type to Standard.

Optionally change the number of cores and amount of memory.

Minimum VM Specs: 16GB RAM / 4 vCPUs. Please also check publisher recommendations for more instance options.

Select the Authentication type as Password and enter Username as ubuntu and the Password of your choice.

Optionally change the OS disk size and its type. By default, the VM comes with 60GB of disk.

Optionally change the network and subnetwork names. Be sure that whichever network you specify has ports 22 (for SSH), 3389 (for RDP), 80 (for HTTP), and 443 (for HTTPS) exposed.

The VM comes with the preconfigured NSG rules. You can check them by clicking on the " Create New option available under the security group option.

Optionally, go to the Management, Advanced, and Tags tabs for any advanced settings you want for the VM.
Click on Review + create and then click on Create when you are done. The virtual machine will begin deploying.

A summary page displays when the virtual machine is successfully created. Click on the " Go to resource link to go to the resource page. It will open an overview page of the virtual machine.

If you want to update your password, then open up the left navigation pane, select Run command, select RunShellScript, and enter the following command to change the password of the VM.

sudo echo ubuntu:yourpassword | chpasswd

Now that the password for the Ubuntu user is set, you can SSH to the VM. To do so, first note the public IP address of the VM from the VM details page, as highlighted below.

Open Putty, paste the IP address, and click on Open.

You can also connect to the VM’s desktop environment from any local Windows machine using RDP protocol or a local Linux machine using Remmina.
To connect using RDP via a Windows Machine, first note the public IP address of the VM from the VM details page, as highlighted below.

Then, from your local Windows machine, go to the “Start” menu, in the search box type and select “Remote Desktop Connection”. In the “Remote Desktop Connection” wizard, copy the public IP address and click Connect

This will connect you to the VM’s desktop environment. Provide the username (e.g., “ubuntu”) and the password set in step 4 to authenticate. Click OK

Now you are connected to the out-of-the-box “Open Notebook — The AI Podcast creator” VM’s desktop environment via Windows Machine.

To connect using RDP via a Linux machine, first note the external IP of the VM from the VM details page, then from your local Linux machine, goto menu, in the search box type and select “Remmina”.

Note: If you don’t have Remmina installed on your Linux machine, first install Remmina as per your Linux distribution.

In the “Remmina Remote Desktop Client” wizard, select the RDP option from the dropdown and paste the external IP, and click Enter.

This will connect you to the VM’s desktop environment. Provide “ubuntu” as the username and the password set in the above reset password step to authenticate. Click OK

Now you are connected to the out-of-the-box “Open Notebook — The AI Podcast creator” VM’s desktop environment via the Linux machine.

The VM will generate a random password to log in to the Open Notebook Web Interface as well as an encryption key for database access. To get the password, connect via the SSH terminal as shown in the steps above and run the command below.

cat /home/ubuntu/open-notebook-local/open_notebook_credentials.txt

To access the Open Notebook Web Interface, copy the public IP address of the VM and paste it in your local browser as https://public_ip_of_vm. Make sure to use https and not http.

The browser will display an SSL certificate warning message. Expand the warning message, accept the certificate warning, and continue.

It will open a login page. Provide the password we got at step 14 above and click Sign In.

Now you are logged in to the Open Notebook Web Interface.

The VM comes with “Ollama setup,” and a few models are already pulled for you to get started. To begin with the Open Notebook, first you need to configure the ollama models. To do so, click on the Models option from the left menu and scroll down to the Ollama section. Click on the Add Configuration button.

Give a name to your configuration, leave API Key blank, and for Base URL enter http://ollama:11434. As the ollama is running in a container, make sure to enter Base URL as http://ollama:11434 and not http://localhost:11434.

Scroll up, and you should see ollama successfully configured. Next, we need to add language and embedding models. For that, click on the models option as shown in the screenshot below.

Select Model Type as Language. By default, the following ollama models are already pulled on this VM. Select language model(s) from the list of available models.

Selected models will get added as shown below. Similarly, again click on the models option to add embedding models. Select Model Type as Embedding and tick mxbai-embed-large: latest from the list of available models.

Note: If you want to go with other LLM providers like OpenAI/Anthropic, etc., then configure the same from this Models page.

Now that we have configured the ollama models, we need to set the default models. On the same Models page, scroll up to the top to the Default Model Assignments section. Select various models from the dropdown.

Now you are all set to use Open Notebook. The basic workflow includes creating a new notebook with a detailed description (as a detailed description helps LLM to understand the context of the notebook and provide you with better answers), adding sources, gathering insights from the added sources using transformations, and finally talking to the Assistant.

To add the sources, click on New from the left menu and select the Sources option. Choose from various options.

Click on Next to select the Notebook for these sources.

Click on Next and lastly select the Transformation option.

You can see the list of added sources here.

Once your sources are ready, you can use the notebook, Ask and Search, and Podcast features.

For the podcast feature, you will need some extra configuration. You will need to update the podcast profile and need to provide the various models, including voice. Once it is ready, go to the podcast tab from the left pane, click on Generate podcast and provide the details here. For more details, please refer to the official documentation here

Lastly, to pull more ollama models on this VM, connect via SSH terminal and run below command.

sudo docker exec open-notebook-local-ollama-1 ollama pull <modelname>

e.g sudo docker exec open-notebook-local-ollama-1 ollama pull qwen2.5:latest

For more details, please visit the Official Documentation page

Conclusion

Deploying Open Notebook on Azure gives you far more than just an AI tool — it gives you a fully controlled, scalable, and production-ready knowledge platform.

With your setup complete, you can now:

Transform documents into podcast-style audio
Build a private, searchable knowledge base
Experiment with local and cloud-based AI models
Create AI-powered workflows without worrying about data privacy or unpredictable API costs

The combination of Azure’s robust infrastructure and Open Notebook’s flexible architecture makes it an excellent choice for individuals, teams, and startups looking to build or scale AI-driven applications.

Now that everything is up and running, the next step is simple:

Start adding your content, explore the assistant, and generate your first AI-powered podcast.