Colab

Colab, short for Colaboratory, is a hosted Jupyter notebook service from Google. It provides an interactive Python environment that runs on Google's cloud infrastructure and is accessible directly from a web browser. Notebooks are stored in Google Drive and can be shared and collaborated on in real time, similar to other Google Workspace apps. Colab combines code execution, rich text, and visualizations, and supports popular data science libraries such as NumPy, pandas, matplotlib, and scikit-learn, with many machine learning frameworks like TensorFlow, PyTorch, Keras, and JAX preinstalled or easily installable.

Colab notebooks run on remote virtual machines, which can be equipped with CPUs, GPUs, or TPUs, when available. This makes it possible to train machine learning models without local hardware. Users can mount their Google Drive to access data, import datasets from the web or GitHub, and export notebooks back to ipynb or Python scripts. Colab provides features such as code completion, inline plotting, and interactive widgets.

Colab is available in a free tier and paid tiers—Colab Pro and Colab Pro+—that offer longer runtimes, more RAM, and faster access to GPUs/TPUs. Free usage is subject to quotas and time limits, including disconnections after periods of inactivity or session limits. The service is intended for research, education, experimentation, and prototyping, not for running long-term production workloads or handling highly sensitive data. Colab was introduced by Google in 2017 as part of its effort to make machine learning and data science more accessible.