What is Google Colaboratory? An Easy Explanation

Introduction to Google Colaboratory

Google Colaboratory is a product that allows anyone to use Python through the browser. Google Colaboratory is a long name so Google gave it a short name Colab to make it easy for users.

Few things about Google Colaboratory:

  1. Google Colaboratory is developed by the Google Research team and it is particularly well suited to machine learning, data analysis, and education. 
  2. Google Colaboratory let everyone create and execute any Python program through the browser. 
  3. Technically speaking, Google Colaboratory is a hosted Jupyter notebook service that offers free access to computer resources, including GPUs, and requires no setup to use. That means you do not have to pay to use it.

Limitations of Google Colaboratory

Resources provided by Google Colaboratory are not guaranteed but they are unlimited with some variations, which means that its usage limit varies. Google says that this non-guarantee and variation in the usage limit is imposed because it was needed to provide the resources of Google Colaboratory for free.

But if someone is interested in getting better resources from Google Colaboratory they can make use of Colab Pro which is a paid version of Google Colaboratory.

There are 9 restrictions in the free version of Google Colaboratory as defined below:

  1. file hosting, media serving, or other web service offerings not related to interactive computing with Colab
  2. downloading torrents or engaging in peer-to-peer file-sharing
  3. using a remote desktop or SSH
  4. connecting to remote proxies
  5. mining cryptocurrency
  6. running denial-of-service attacks
  7. password cracking
  8. using multiple accounts to work around access or resource usage restrictions
  9. creating deepfakes

They say that the resources provided in the Google Colaboratory are categorized based on the interactive use cases and they prohibit three types of actions such as bulk computing, negative actions for others, and the actions that are linked to avoiding their policies.

Users who choose to utilize Colab Pro have some more restrictions on their use but these restrictions are some common restrictions for a paid user by Google. You can have a look at these restrictions in section 3 using this link.

What is the difference between Jupyter Notebook and Google Colaboratory?

Jupyter Notebook is a web-based interactive development environment (IDE) that allows users to create and share documents that contain live code, equations, visualizations, and narrative text. It is commonly used for data analysis, scientific computing, machine learning, and natural language processing.

The name "Jupyter" is a combination of the three core programming languages that the project supports: Julia, Python, and R. However, Jupyter supports many other programming languages as well, including C++, Scala, and R Markdown.

On the other hand, Google Colaboratory is a similar service such as Jupyter from Google that allows users to write and execute Python code in a web browser, with the added ability to use and share Jupyter notebooks. It also provides a powerful platform for data science and machine learning and is a great alternative to running Jupyter notebooks on your local machine.

One of the main advantages of Google Colaboratory is that it gives you access to powerful hardware, including GPUs and TPUs, which can be used to speed up computationally intensive tasks like deep learning and training machine learning models. This can be especially useful for users who do not have access to powerful hardware on their local machines.

Another advantage of Google Colaboratory is that it is easy to use and requires no setup or installation. You can start using it simply by logging in with your Google account and creating a new notebook. Additionally, Google Colaboratory notebooks can be easily shared with others, allowing for collaborative data science and machine learning projects.

In Google Colaboratory, you can also access to Google services like Google drive, sheets, and Bigquery. You can also use Google Colaboratory with a local runtime or mount google drive, to store, access, and retrieve your files.

Overall, Google Colaboratory is a great tool for data scientists, machine learning engineers, and anyone else who wants to work with Python and Jupyter notebooks in the cloud.

How to create Google Colaboratory notebooks?

Google Colaboratory uses Google Drive to store the notebooks, therefore, make sure that you are logged in to Google Drive before creating the notebooks.

After logging in to Google Drive, click on the below link to open Google Colaboratory:

https://colab.research.google.com/notebooks/welcome.ipynb

This will open a window as shown below:

Google Colaboratory Homepage

To create a new notebook click File->New Notebook

This will open a new notebook that looks like below:

New Notebook

The default name of the notebook is "Untitled0.ipynb" but you can change it by clicking on this name and typing the name you want to give it.

Now you can use this notebook just like a Jupyter Notebook.

You can also create the Google Colaboratory notebook using Google Drive. Follow the below procedure to do so:
1. Click on New->more->connect more apps
2. Search for Colaboratory in the Google Workspace Marketplace
3. Install it if not installed and then click on the Launch link on the top right corner of the pop-up.

This pop-up should look like this:

Colab from Google Workspace Marketplace

How to open a notebook that is already saved in your Google Drive or GitHub?

To open an existing notebook in Google Colaboratory you can click on File->Open. The default option will display Recent notebooks as shown below:

Opening a notebook

Using this pop-up, you can look at examples of Google Colabotary notebooks, open notebooks in Google Drive, Supply a notebook from GitHub, or upload one through the Upload option.

How you can save Google Colaboratory notebooks?

These notebooks are automatically saved in Google Drive or they can be supplied from GitHub.

How to share Google Colaboratory notebooks?

You can share these notebooks simply by using the share option which is given at the top right corner of the notebook. 

If you share your Google Colaboratory notebooks then everything in your notebook will be shared like coding programs, outputs, text, and comments. But you can exclude your codes if you don't want to share them by using the steps Edit > Notebook settings > Omit code cell output when saving this notebook.

Although the exclusion can be done I would suggest you do not exclude anything because this will make it easier to understand the notebook for any reader. Also, if you need to read the notebook after a time gap then everything in your Google Colaboratory notebook will be useful.

Summary

I believe if you are already using Jupyter notebooks then you will find Google Colaboratory notebook better due to their ease of use as compared to Jupyter notebooks. If you have any thoughts about Google's Colaboratory notebooks then please mention them in the comment box.

                                                                                                                                                                                                 Next 

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