Sagemaker Studio Notebook vs JupyterLab Instance

Hello.

SageMaker Studio notebooks are Jupyter notebooks fully managed by SageMaker.
Since it is a managed service, it is easier to prepare Jupyter notebooks than preparing them yourself.
https://aws.amazon.com/sagemaker/faqs/?nc1=h_ls

What are Amazon SageMaker Studio notebooks?
You can use fully managed Jupyter notebooks in SageMaker for the complete ML development. Scale compute instances up and down with the board selection of compute-optimized and GPU-accelerated instances in the cloud.

While SageMaker Notebook Instances are also a managed service, and have a smaller footprint (e.g. no EFS, specific VPC dependency, etc) so may be simpler for individuals to initially set up, SageMaker Studio brings a range of extra capabilities that bigger teams and more advanced users may find more useful as they scale.

Some examples:

• Centralized management of multiple user profiles (which need not have direct AWS Console access), and their environments (e.g. lifecycle script customizations, kernels, etc)
• Explicit multi-user real-time collaboration via shared spaces (multiple users logging in to a plain SageMaker Notebook Instance concurrently can sometimes cause unexpected consequences, because the user abstraction is not explicit)
• Access to a range of features not available through the AWS Console for SageMaker or the Notebook Instance JupyterLab UI, like:
  • Alternative IDEs including Code Editor (based on the open-source core of VSCode) and RStudio
  • No-code fine-tuning and deployment of a wide range of models with SageMaker JumpStart
  • Low-code/no-code ML with SageMaker Canvas
  • Extended UIs for MLOps features like SageMaker Pipelines and SageMaker Feature Store... Or just the basics like scheduling runs of a notebook.

While some users prefer the setup simplicity of SageMaker Notebook Instances, others find the extra features of SageMaker Studio can help drive productivity - it depends on a range of factors like the size of your team, the features you're interested in using, and the amount of MLOps automation and orchestration you're looking for.