What is Google Colab? Google Colab is a cloud-based service that allows you to write and run code in a Jupyter Notebook environment. Jupyter Notebooks are a popular tool for data scientists. Google Colab is a free online coding environment that allows you to take advantage of powerful CPUs and GPUs without having to invest in any hardware. You can use it to write and execute code, develop models, and collaborate with other developers on projects. While its free, it also has paid plans that offer more resources.

Colab is particularly suited for machine learning and data analysis, as it provides its users free access to high computing resources such as GPUs and TPUs that are essential to training models quickly and efficiently.

You can open Google Colab. A popup will appear with different options to load Colab Notebooks. Click the screenshot below to enlarge it.

To create a new Google Colab notebook you can just click on New notebook at the bottom right.

The interface is similar to Jupyter notebook. You write code in cells. You can also write documentation text inside a “markdown” cell that does not get run like code does. Therefore, a cell is a block of code that can be executed independently from other code in the notebook.

Python

Google Colab is a Python environment that allows you to run Python code in your browser. You can also import libraries like you would in a regular Python file.