Netflix open-sources Polynote to simplify data science and machine learning workflows

Machine learning and data science development isn't exactly a walk in the park, but Netflix hopes to streamline the arduous bits with a new freely available platform. The tech giant today announced that it has open-sourced Polynote, a multi-language programming notebook environment that integrates with Apache Spark and offers robust support for Scala, Python, and SQL. In a blog post, Netflix said that Polynote -- which has seen "substantial" adoption among its personalization and recommendation teams -- was designed to enable data scientists and AI researchers to integrate Netflix's JVM-based machine learning framework with Python machine learning and visualization libraries. "On the Netflix personalization infrastructure team, our job is to accelerate machine learning innovation by building tools that can remove pain points and allow researchers to focus on research. Polynote originated from a frustration with the shortcomings of existing notebook tools, especially with respect to their support of Scala," said the company.