Polars Cloud and Distributed Polars now available

After working hard since our Polars Cloud announcement last February, we are pleased to officially launch Polars Cloud. Polars Cloud is now Generally Available on AWS. Beyond that, we also launched our novel Distributed Engine in Open Beta on Polars Cloud.

You can immediately get started at https://cloud.pola.rs/.

After that you can fire a remote distributed query:

import polars_cloud as pc import polars as pl from datetime import date with pc . ComputeContext ( workspace = "" , cpus = 2 , memory = 8 , cluster_size = 8 , ) as ctx : in_progress = ( pl . scan_parquet ( "s3://polars-cloud-samples-us-east-2-prd/pdsh/sf100/lineitem/" , storage_options = { "aws_request_payer" : "true" , }) . filter (pl. col ( "l_shipdate" ) <= date ( 1998 , 9 , 2 )) . group_by ( "l_returnflag" , "l_linestatus" ) . agg ( count_order = pl. len () ) . remote (ctx) . distributed () . execute () ) print (in_progress. await_result ().head)

Closing the DataFrame scale gap

The General Availability of Polars Cloud on AWS marks a major milestone in closing the DataFrame scale gap—the historic divide between the ease of pandas locally and the scalability of PySpark remotely. By making Polars Cloud broadly accessible, we bring to life our mission of delivering fast, flexible and open-source data tools that run everywhere, giving users a single API that seamlessly scales from a laptop to the cloud.

Equally significant is the Open Beta of our Distributed Engine, which leverages Polars’ novel streaming architecture to offer not just horizontal but also vertical and diagonal scaling strategies. This design directly addresses the cost, complexity and performance tradeoffs users face today, while making high-performance compute broadly accessible. Together, these launches represent a step-change: remote execution that feels native, distribution without friction, and an architecture built to meet the future of large-scale data processing head-on.

1. What is Polars Cloud

Polars Cloud is a managed data platform that enables you to run Polars queries remotely in the cloud at scale. We will manage the cloud infrastructure and the scaling. Besides remote execution, Polars Cloud offers different scaling strategies, where distributed is most important. Our distributed engine uses our OSS streaming engine on the workers. This ensures we stay committed in making OSS Polars better as we will become one of the direct users. Because of Polars’ strength in vertical compute, Polars’ distributed offers not only horizontal, but also diagonal scaling strategies. Here we have a single big worker for tasks that would be better off on a beefy single node and would not benefit from the shuffling overhead. Polars Cloud will allow you to choose the best scaling strategy that fits your use case, offering one API for any scale, meaning you can reduce cost, time, and complexity.

Learn more about Polars Cloud in our initial announcement post.

... continue reading