Alibaba Cloud makes available its self-developed algorithm via open source on Github

Alibaba Cloud, named Aliyun, announced today that the core codes of Alink, its self-developed algorithm, have been made available on Github via open source.

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Aliyun offers a broad range of algorithm libraries that support both batch and stream processing, which is critical for machine learning tasks like online product recommendation and intelligent customer services. Data analysts and software developers can access the codes on GitHub to build their own software, facilitating tasks such as statistics analysis, machine learning, real-time prediction, personalised recommendation, and abnormality detection.

Github has entered and started its operations in India, reportedly the largest community of developers on the platform.

Yangqing Jia, President and Senior Fellow of Data Platform at Alibaba Cloud Intelligence, said,

"As a platform that consists of various algorithms combining learning in various data processing patterns, Alink can be a valuable option for developers looking for robust big data and advanced machine learning tools. 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 long-held commitment."

Alink was developed based on Flink, a unified distributed computing engine. Based on Flink, Alink has realised seamless unification of batch and stream processing, offering a more effective platform for developers to perform data analytics and machine learning tasks. Apart from Alibaba’s proprietary data storage, it also supports other open-source data storage, such as Kafka, HDFS, and HBase.

Alink has already been deployed in powering various businesses within the Alibaba ecosystem. It helped increase the click rate of product recommendations by four percent on Alibaba’s ecommerce platform, Tmall, during Alibaba’s global shopping festival this year.

"Alibaba Cloud is committed to building a collaborative cloud computing platform, so that our partners including developers can engage with us to innovate, which will in turn create long-term benefits for our customers and end users. We hope to create an ecosystem where our customers and partners can exchange ideas, so that we can jointly innovate and create the best products and solutions to address the business challenges in India," said Alex Li, Cloud General Manager of Alibaba for South Asia.

As of today, Alibaba claims to have acquired over 690,000 stars and 20,000 contributors on Github, being one of the top 10 contributors to the community. Besides Github, Alibaba has also been active in open-source communities including Cloud Native Computing Foundation, Aliance for Open Media, Cloud Foundry, Hyperledger, Open Container Initiative, Continuous Delivery Foundation, The Apache Software Foundation, MariaDB Foundation, and The Linux Foundation.

Since the first batch of open-source projects launched in 2011, developers at Alibaba have been actively contributing to open-source communities. The company now boasts of having 180 open-source projects, contributing codes to all aspects of software solutions, including cloud infrastructure and machine learning, container, enterprise-class system, database and network, a statement said.

(Edited by Evelyn Ratnakumar)

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