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Vertex AI Workbench or Colab Pro/Pro+

Written by Andy Yates | Jun 4, 2023 5:00:00 AM

Hey folks --

I was wondering if anyone here had thoughts about the new Vertex AI Workbench announcement, and how that might sit alongside offerings like Colab (including the Pro and Pro+ packages)?

Rather than provisioning ever-larger laptops to data scientists in the company, we've been encouraging them to make use of cloud hosted tooling - and recently have seen an uptick in requests for the paid Colab packages. Unfortunately these are quite hard to manage at an organisational level, as it's a credit-card purchase on an individual account, rather than something that is attached to organisational billing. It seems that the new Workbench offering might be a little more appropriate in this case, but I was wondering if anyone had a handy comparison of the services more generally?

At first glance, it looks like Vertex AI might be a little more focused on productionising the notebook - which has been controversial in some circles :) - but I don't know that there's anything about it that would prevent the more exploratory data science work that they are often used for?

Would love to hear what everyone thinks,

 

cheers!

 

-- Andy

 

Best Answer by: stewypunk (10 months ago)

What are the advantages of Vertex AI?

Reproducibility and traceability. A very big advantage of Vertex AI pipelines is an ordered model training process. Not only are all trained models stored in the Vertex AI registry, they are also linked to all other artifacts involved in the pipeline's execution.

 

 

What are the top 3 capabilities of Vertex AI workbench?

  • Easy exploration and analysis. Simplified access to data and in-notebook access to machine learning with BigQuery, Dataproc, Spark, and Vertex AI integration.
  • Rapid prototyping and model development. ...
  • End-to-end notebook workflows.

 

What is workbench in Vertex AI?

Vertex AI Workbench offers a managed notebooks option with built-in integrations that help you to set up an end-to-end notebook-based production environment. For users who need full control over their environment, Vertex AI Workbench provides a user-managed notebooks option.

 

its integrated...