Abstract

Online code sharing and documentation platforms have become an essential part of every analyst and data scientist’s lives. Google Colab and Jupyter Notebook are some of the well named platforms which are used quite extensively to work on datasets. These platforms allow the user to showcase and manipulate data along with the capabilities of adding beautiful visualizations and essential narrative texts. They offer high customization abilities for the users along with Collaboration and sharing capabilities. These notebooks also offer a variety of languages to choose from, like R, Python, PySpark etc. if the necessary packages are installed. Other platforms available for working on big data includes R Markdown, Kaggle, Spark Notebook and many other popular tools. With the recent developments in Data Science technologies and Machine learning, there has been an increased adoption for these platforms, which has eventually led to the addition of new features to these tools.

JupyterLab is a web-based interactive development environment for Jupyter Notebook, codes as well as data. It has been designed to be flexible so as to incorporate any form of workflow into it pertaining to Data Science, Scientific Computing as well as Machine Learning & Artificial Intelligence. It also allows developers to write their own plugins and packages, which can then be easily incorporated into the workflows, i.e., seamless integration experience. Jupyter Notebook is a component of Lab which is an open-source web application that allows users to create and share documents containing live code, equations, visualizations and narrative text. Some of the use cases include data cleaning and transformation, numerical simulation, statistical modeling, and data visualization.

Google Colab or short for Colaboratory is a product developed by Google Research, which is a free to use platform and can be used to execute arbitrary Python codes through the browser. This tool is especially suited for machine learning, data analysis as well as educational purposes. Colab is a hosted Jupyter Notebook service which requires no setup and provides free access to computing power like GPUs on the cloud. This is ofcourse extended if the user pays for the pro version called Colab Pro.