Question for the Colab team:

The restrictions listed at https://research.google.com/colaboratory/tos_v3.html differ slightly from the limits listed at https://research.google.com/colaboratory/faq.html specifically tos_v3.html does not mention these items from the faq

    * using a remote desktop or SSH
    * connecting to remote proxies

I can appreciate why those were added - I've read posts and notebooks explaining how you can use ngrok or cloudflare to do those things in violation of the restrictions in the faq and clearly many people aren't using Colab as intended.

Speaking as someone who has been playing around with the Colab free tier with the expectation of moving to a paid service once I know what I'm really doing, I'd like to know if it's likely these restrictions will be eased a bit with the move to a compute credit system.

I'm still learning and haven't had a need to do those things yet but I believe remote ssh access would greatly simplify managing things. The Jupyter interface and integrated Colab debugger are good for experimenting but I'm worried that as I get closer to production I'll need a way to observe and change the state of long-running Colab processes the way I could with ssh, ansible or other existing tooling.

Clearly I can build that myself or use something like Anvil Works https://anvil.works but that's time and effort I'd rather avoid if possible. So I'm hoping that the Colab team will ease the SSH restriction for people like me who want to use it for more traditional ops/monitoring of long running tasks.

Do you anticipate any change or easing of the SSH restriction?

user:	stableskeptic
created:	August 31, 2022
karma:	1