Can You Use Google Colab Free Version for Professional Work?

Simple discussion about Google Colab limitations in real life projects

Google Collaboratory is a Cloud Service provided by Google that allows you to use a “Jupyter Notebook-like” environment to run Python, allows access to GPU and TPU processors, and has already installed the main libraries you will need for Data Science. All this is available for free but within certain limits. The big question here is if this free service is enough for professional work, or if it is only useful for learning purposes or pilot projects with fewer data.

Let’s try to answer this question!

I have used Google Colab for two very different professional projects. These projects required different resources, and I can say that I experienced a lot of “Session Crashes” because I reached usage limits. That being said, I could complete the work only in one case, and yet I have to manage and make many changes in my initial code and analysis methods in order to “fit in the limits”.

Case 1. Job done

Job description

In this job, I had to access remote data in an SQL database hosted by Google. To access the data, I used Google Big Query integration with Python in Google…