Use Google Colab Resources on local IDE

Question

I have a big doubt... is see a lot of blog posts where they say that you can use the Colab front-end to edit a local Jupiter Notebook

However I don't see the point... the actual advantage would be to use something like DataSpell or some local IDE, on a remote Notebook on Colab, and use the Colab Resources to do the computations, so you have:

1. IDE level of suggestions (Colab is pretty slow compared to local IDE)
2. cloud computing performances and advantages

Hoever, I don't see any blog talking about this... is there any way to do this?

Herries

Answer 1

You could use something like colab-ssh but Google has cracked down on these tools making the whole process inconvenient in one way or another. I think a better approach would be to just use your IDE as you would and store your notebooks on GitHub. Git-to-Colab is officially supported and you're obviously not doing heavy computing or long-running tasks during development so I don't think there should be an issue. For computationally inexpensive tasks (dataviz?) Codespaces or Datalore should be enough.

Hiram

Answer 2

If you want to use Colab resources only to compute some intensive parts of your code, you can create a flask server inside Colab and expose the APIs with the code you want to execute.

Birdcage

@toyotaSupra I have noticed in my reviews that you have been making a large number of edits to posts, generally adding code fences. This is a good thing. However, in cases like this post, neither "Colab" nor "APIs" are code and should not be formatted as such. – Confirmand

Sorry about that. – Holliholliday