Google Colab also known as Google Colaboratory is a product from Google Research which allows user to run their python code from their browser with no installation setup.
Google Co-lab provides learners, researchers & data scientists a hosted Jupyter notebook service providing free access to computing resources including GPUs. Colab is a Python development environment that runs in the browser using Google Cloud.
The Jupyter Notebook is an open-source web application that allows you to create and share documents that contain live code, equations, visualizations, and narrative text. Uses include data cleaning and transformation, numerical simulation, statistical modeling, data visualization, machine learning, and much more.
Colab allows you to use and share Jupyter notebooks with others without having to download, install, or run anything.
Colab notebooks are stored in Google Drive, or can be loaded from GitHub. Colab notebooks can be shared just as you would with Google Docs or Sheets
All Colab notebooks are stored in the open-source Jupyter notebook format ( .ipynb).
Code is executed in a virtual machine private to your account. Virtual machines are deleted when idle for a while, and have a maximum lifetime enforced by the Colab service.
Google also provides Colab Pro at 9.99 USD per month. Users of Google Colab pro will get priority access to the fastest GPUs (Nividia T4 and P100 GPUs) and free users of Google Colab gets access to K80s. It is to be noted that usage limits are much lower in the free version compared to the pro version.
With Colab Pro your notebooks can stay connected for up to 24 hours and whereas in the free version notebooks can stay connected up to 12 hours.
