Google Colaboratory, also known as Google Colab, is a free cloud service that Google provides for education and research. It is essentially a Jupyter notebook environment that requires no setup to use and is entirely hosted in the cloud. It allows you to write and execute Python code in your browser with the following benefits:

1. Zero Configuration: You don’t need to configure anything to start using Google Colab. You can just create a new notebook and start coding.

2. Free Access to Hardware Accelerators: Google Colab offers free access to hardware accelerators like GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) and TPU (Tensor Processing Unit). These accelerators can greatly speed up machine learning and other computationally intensive tasks.

3. Easy Sharing and Collaboration: Like Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides, you can share your Colab notebooks with others and collaborate in real time. This makes it a fantastic tool for team projects or for teaching coding to a group.

4. Integration with Google Drive: Your notebooks are stored in your Google Drive account, so you can access them from anywhere, share them easily, and have a secure backup.

Here’s a simple example of using Google Colab for Python:

1. Go to the Google Colab website (https://colab.research.google.com/).
2. Click on ‘New Notebook’ to create a new notebook.
3. A new tab will open with a blank notebook.
4. In the first cell, you can start writing Python code.
5. Press Shift+Enter to run the code in the cell.

Here’s an example of Python code you might run:

After pressing Shift+Enter, the code runs on a cloud server, and you’ll see the output below the cell: