Alibaba Group's cloud unit has published "core codes" of its Alink platform on GitHub, uploading a rang of algorithm libraries that it says support batch and stream processing. These are essential to support machine learning tasks such as online product recommendations and smart customer services. Alibaba Cloud said developers and data analysts could tap the codes to build software functions such as statistics analysis, machine learning, real-time prediction, personalised recommendation, and detection of anomalies. Developed based on unified distributed computing engine Flink, Alink supports a range of open-source data storage platforms other than Alibaba's own proprietary offering, including Kafka, HDFS, and HBase. Alink would be a relevant option for developers seeking big data and machine-learning tools, said Alibaba Cloud's president and senior fellow of data platform, Jia Yangqing.