[bblcla]

Thanks!

The big difference is that Google Colab runs in your web browser, whereas Moonglow lets you connect to compute in the VSCode/Cursor notebook interface. We've found a lot of people really like the code-completion in VSCode/Cursor and want to be able to access it while writing notebook code.

Colab only lets you connect to compute provided by Google. For instance, even Colab Pro doesn't offer H100s, whereas you can get that pretty easily on Runpod.

[williamstein]

> Colab only lets you connect to compute provided by Google.

That is no longer true - you can use remote kernels on your own compute via colab: https://research.google.com/colaboratory/local-runtimes.html

There is also the same feature in CoCalc, including using the official colab Docker image: https://doc.cocalc.com/compute_server.html#onprem

Cocalc also supports 1 click use of vscode.

(The above might not work with runpod, since their execution environment is locked down. However it works with other clouds like Lambda, Hyperstack, etc.)

[bblcla]

Ah, yeah, I misspoke, sorry. I was aware of that feature, but everyone I've talked to said it's so annoying to use they basically never use it, so I didn't think it was worth mentioning.

The big reason it's annoying is because (I believe) Colab still only lets you connect to runtimes running on your computer - which is why at the end at the end of that article they suggest using SSH port forwarding if you want to connect to a remote cluster. I know at least one company has written a hacky wrapper that researchers can use to connect to their own cluster through Colab, but it's not ideal.

I think Moonglow's target audience is slightly different than Colab's though because of the tight VSCode/Cursor integration - many people we've talked to said they really value the code-complete, which you can't get in any web frontend!

[dovholuknf]

Interesting idea. I'm not very well-versed in training models or LLMs or even Jupyter Notebooks, but the comment about port forwarding SSH caught my eye since I work on a free, open source zero-trust overlay network (OpenZiti). I tried to find some information about moonglow under the hood / how it worked but didn't succeed.

If you're interested, you might find embedding OpenZiti into Moonglow a pretty compelling alternative to port forwarding and it might open even crazier ideas once your connectivitiy is embedded into the app. You can find the cheapest compute for people and just connect them to that cheapest compute using your extension... Might be interesting? Anyway, I'd be happy to discuss some time if that sounds neat... Until then, good luck with your launch!

[bblcla]

Cool! We actually don't do port forwarding over SSH, we do it over an ngrok-like solution that we forked/modified. I looked at a few options while we were designing this, including Tailscale and ngrok, but none of them exactly suited our needs, and the pricing would have been prohibitive for something that's a pretty core part of our product.

OpenZiti looks really cool though - I'll take a look!

[williamstein]

Is it possible to use OpenZiti with Runpod? Their execution environment is very locked down, which might make ssh the only option.

[qrkourier]

At a glance, the RunPod's serverless and pod options would probably work well with OpenZiti. I didn't explore their vLLM option.

Using OpenZiti w/ Serverless probably means integrating an OpenZiti SDK with your serverless application. That way, it'll connect to the OpenZiti network every time it spawns.

The SDK option works anywhere you can deploy your application because it doesn't need any sidecar, agent, proxy, etc, so it's definitely the most flexible and I can give you some examples if you mention the language or framework you're using.

The pod option says "container based" so it'll take some investigation to find out if an OpenZiti sidecar or other tunneling proxy is an option. Would you be looking to publish something running in RunPod (the server is in RunPod), or access something elsewhere from a RunPod pod (the client is in RunPod), or both?

[dovholuknf]

I poked at it a bit but there was no free trial period. I know a bunch of people are using OpenZiti and zrok for Jupyter notebooks in general... Here's a blog I saw not long back that might help but I wasn't able to prove/test/try it... (sorry)

https://www.pogs.cafe/software/tunneling-sagemaker-kaggle

[dovholuknf]

I don't actually know. I'll go poke with Runpod for a few and see :)

[elashri]

> I think Moonglow's target audience is slightly different than Colab's though because of the tight VSCode/Cursor integration - many people we've talked to said they really value the code-complete, which you can't get in any web frontend!

At the risk of repeating the famous Dropbox comment

I like the idea and that the ease of usage is your selling point. But I don't know if that is actually a reasonable reason. People who are entrenched that much in VSCode ecosystem wouldn't find it a problem to deploy dockerized Nvidia GPU container and connect to their own compute instance via remote/tunnel plugins on VSCode which one can argue does make more sense.

Congratulations on the launch and good luck with the product.

[tmychow]

Thanks! I think the "deploy and connect" workflow is itself not super painful, but even if you're invested in VSCode, doing that again and again every day is pretty annoying (and it certainly was for me when I used to do ML), so hopefully the ease of use is valuable for people.