Today’s guest writer is Pradeep Ramamoorthy, Senior Product Manager in the Online Products group at MathWorks

A few weeks ago, my colleague Gandharv summarized the options available to you to configure MATLAB and Simulink on public clouds like AWS, Azure, and GCP. With our pre-built reference architectures, you can deploy MATLAB and Simulink on a public cloud instance within minutes and configure instance types and integrate with your organization’s authentication protocols and storage solutions.  

In this blog post, I would like to shed light on another solution that you can leverage for interactive design and development in the cloud: MATLAB Online.  

What is MATLAB Online? 

MATLAB Online provides browser-based access to MATLAB, and is maintained and managed by MathWorks, for you. As part of your startup license, you already have access to MATLAB Online at no additional cost.  

Why should I use MATLAB Online? 

Get started, now.  

MATLAB Online is tailored for instant access – just sign in and you are good to go: https://matlab.mathworks.com/ – no downloads, no installs or configuration required. As such, it is a great way to get started with some prototyping, data analysis or application development. I’m only half-joking, but you can get to the command prompt in MATLAB Online quicker than you can finish reading the rest of this blog post (but please do read it to learn about other benefits 😊).  

Continuity for your data and artifacts.  

While instant access to MATLAB is good, we understand that it’s irrelevant without your data, code, models, and other artifacts. Which is why we’ve built an ecosystem that ensures continuity – your artifacts are available to you however you use MATLAB (both on your desktop as well as online).  

• You can store your artifacts in MATLAB Drive, our default cloud storage solution when you use MATLAB Online. You receive 20 GB of storage and can share your work as links or invite colleagues to collaborate with you. You can also use MATLAB Connector to sync your files across your desktop, ensuring uninterrupted access as you move across MATLAB Online and MATLAB installed on your machine.  

• Already using another cloud storage solution? MATLAB Online also enables connectivity to your OneDrive (and we’re happy to get feedback on other options we need to integrated with).  

Connect to hardware. 

MATLAB Online also enables connectivity with hardware like Raspberry Pi and Arduino as well as sensors on your mobile device to complement your data acquisition and analysis workflows.  

• Packages to acquire sensor data from your iOS and Android devices are pre-installed with MATLAB Online. With MATLAB Mobile, you can acquire data from sensors like the accelerometer and GPS on your mobile device and stream that to MATLAB Online for analysis and visualization. 

• MATLAB Online can also communicate with your Arduino hardware and Raspberry Pi boards, and connect USB webcams for image and video capture to kick off workflows like image classification.  

From ad-hoc prototyping to structured software development. 

My description above may have cast MATLAB Online as a solution for ad-hoc or lightweight prototyping. While it’s great for that, we also support software development workflows by way of integrating with source control.  

• We provide native integration with Git for version control for your code, read more here. You can also access source control options from the side panel or from the context menu of each folder.  

• You can also easily clone repos from GitHub in a few clicks and use personal access tokens for authentication. See this blog post for a sample workflow.   

Share your work.  

Apart from the sharing options that MATLAB Drive gives you, it’s also easy to share your work with your colleagues or even a broader community of users. If your code and associated artifacts are in a public location like GitHub, you can generate a link that you can share with your audience that lets them ‘open in MATLAB Online’.  

• For instance, here’s a GitHub repo on GitHub that we maintain for some teaching resources. And here’s a link to open specific artifacts (in this case, a Live Script) directly in MATLAB Online: https://matlab.mathworks.com/open/github/v1?repo=MathWorks-Teaching-Resources/Fourier-Analysis&project=fourier-analysis.prj&file=Scripts/ComplexFourierSeries.mlx   

• Generating an ‘open in MATLAB Online’ link is doable by filling out a few details in an interactive form on this page: Open in MATLAB Online from GitHub. 

• When sharing artifacts like MATLAB apps and Live Scripts, you can also enable a full-screen focused view experience for your audience.  

Get started today 

Start using MATLAB Online today: https://matlab.mathworks.com/ 

Learn more about MATLAB Online here: https://www.mathworks.com/products/matlab-online.html  

We’d love to hear about how MATLAB Online can help your startup – leave a comment below with questions, comments and more!