Datalab shutdown

On September 2, 2022, Datalab was deprecated and the ability to create new Datalab notebooks was removed. On September 29, 2023, Datalab was officially shut down. Vertex AI Workbench provides a notebook-based environment that offers capabilities beyond Datalab. We recommend that you use Vertex AI Workbench for new projects and migrate your Datalab notebooks to Vertex AI Workbench.

This page provides details about the Datalab shutdown.

Why was Datalab shut down?

Datalab was launched in 2015 as a notebook service that customers could use to analyze data, build models, and deploy them. Over the years, Google has launched comparable services such as Vertex AI Workbench and Deep Learning VM Images, which provide more features and capabilities, have high usage, and are in active development. Datalab had lower usage and was not in active development.

How does this shutdown impact existing Datalab instances?

Customers who are running Datalab instances can continue to run those instances, but further patches or updates, engineering support, and service level agreements for those instances are no longer available.

It is recommended that users migrate their notebooks to other services, such as Deep Learning VM and Vertex AI Workbench.

Migrate a Datalab notebook to Vertex AI Workbench

To migrate a Datalab notebook file to Vertex AI Workbench, complete the following:

  1. Open your Datalab instance, and save a local copy of your notebook file.

  2. Create a Vertex AI Workbench instance. Or see Choose a notebook solution to compare Vertex AI Workbench with other options.

  3. After creating your instance, click Open JupyterLab.

  4. In JupyterLab, click the Upload files button, and complete the dialog to upload a notebook file.