Alibaba Cloud on Thursday released the source codes of a self-developed machine-learning platform it used to power this year’s 11.11 Global Shopping Festival to developers on GitHub, an online open-source community of over 40 million people.
Dubbed “Alink,” the platform offers a collection of algorithms that help process data for machine-learning tasks, such as artificial intelligence-driven customer services and product recommendations, the cloud-computing and machine-intelligence unit of Alibaba Group said. Developers can now access Alink’s source codes on GitHub to build their own software to facilitate tasks, ranging from real-time predictions and personalized recommendations to statistical analysis and abnormality detection.
“As one of the top 10 contributors to GitHub, we are committed to connecting with the open-source community as early as possible in our software development cycles. Sharing Alink on GitHub underlines our such long-held commitment,” said Jia Yangqing, the president and senior fellow of the Data Platform division at Alibaba Cloud Intelligence.
Alibaba Cloud said developers from the company contributed over 180 projects to the open-source community at-large in the past eight years, spanning cloud infrastructure, machine learning, database and networks.
Their releasing of Alink offers a new option for developers looking for “robust big data and advanced machine learning tools,” Jia said, adding that the platform has played a major role in the technology that powers Alibaba’s e-commerce sites, such as for Tmall during this year’s 11.11.
Alink was developed on Apache Flink, the open-source data-processing framework, whose founders went on to create Berlin-based startup Ververica, formerly known as data Artisans.
Alibaba Cloud breaks its global network coverage into regions, with availability zones spread out within them. Each availability zone has one or more data centers. Currently, Alibaba Cloud has 61 availability zones across 20 regions worldwide, including theU.S.,U.K., Australia, Singapore, Malaysia,Japan,Indonesiaand India.
