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Starting Datalab from Cloud Shell

The Datalab documentation shows how to run datalab on:

  • your own machine or,
  • on Google Cloud Platform.

Unfortunately if you are restricted to a Windows 7/8 machine without the required Docker support, I don't think you have easy* options to deploy datalab.

What is the recommended way to deploy Datalab, since the datalab deployer is now deprecated?

*You could of course run Linux in Virtualbox and deploy everything from there, but it's not really easy.

Solution

  • Two quick comments:

    1. There are issues with using Cloud Dev Shell - one mentioned above plus problems with the communication protocol between the notebook server and the kernel and a few others. So we decided against documenting this as an alternative to Docker installation at this point.
    2. There is a better alternative now that is documented here: https://cloud.google.com/datalab/docs/quickstarts/quickstart-gce-frontend. It requires the ability to create an SSH tunnel from your client (Mac/Windows etc) to the GCE VM running Datalab but should otherwise free you from the Docker installation requirement.

    Thanks.

    Dinesh

    (Cloud Datalab Product Manager)