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