Comparing AWS SageMaker Studio Lab with Google Colab

The battle of managed services for notebooks

What are notebooks?

The use of Jupyter notebooks has become very common in exploratory work in Data Science and Machine Learning (ML). The notebooks provide a great help in running program modules iteratively, which becomes super useful in data science. As an example, you can test different hyper-parameters of your ML model without running the data preprocessing steps. Notebooks also allow you to mesh code with annonated comments, which make them super useful as a medium for instructions and sharing. At ‘Learn With a Robot’ we have used Jupyter notebooks extensively as an instructional medium.

Notebooks as Managed Services

Jupyter notebooks are now available as managed services, the prime example being Google Colab. Managed services help in many ways, mainly for working with different team members. With managed resources, you can also get access to superior resources such as the GPU, which you might not be able to afford in your home lab. Google Colab has taken the concept of a managed J…