Google has today launched a new interactive developer platform for exploring, analyzing and visualizing data easily with just a single click. The tool has been dubbed Cloud Datalab and the company says it will help developers “get insights from raw data and explore, share, and publish reports in a fast, simple and cost-effective way.”
Cloud Datalab will allow you to analyze your data on BigQuery, Compute Engine, and Google Cloud Storage using Python, SQL and JavaScript (for BigQuery User Defined Functions). The tool runs in a single click and works on App Engine and emulates automatically so you can focus on exploring your data.
The service is based on Jupyter notebooks ( previously known as IPython), a format that allows you to create documents with live code and visualizations. This is a very popular platform too. So, we can expect Datalab to be quite user-friendly and easy to use.
Getting started is quite simple. All you have to do is deploy Cloud Datalab as an App Engine application. This is where you will be charged after the free beta period is up. The next thing you need to do is start a new project and set up new notebooks. The service comes in with a range of built-in notebooks to get you a feel of how you can proceed.
Google hasn’t yet released any pricing information on the new tool and the tool is, as of yet available in beta. Pricing should be out in the next couple of weeks though.
Another exciting thing about Cloud Datalab is that it’s open source and developers can extend it easily using GitHub.
Google has also launched another service in tow with Datalab today. The service is called Google Cloud Shell and it will give users command-line accaess to their compute resources on Google Cloud Platform. The shell is powered by a temporary Compute Engine virtuwl machine with 5 GB persistemt storage and access to the Software Development Kits over cloud of Google.
