FAQ
On this page you can find answers to some frequently asked questions around Polars Cloud.
Who is behind Polars Cloud?
Polars Cloud is built by the organization behind the open source Polars project. We are committed to improve Polars open source for all single machine workloads. Polars Cloud will extend Polars functionalities for remote and distributed compute.
Where does the compute run?
All compute runs in your own cloud environment. The main reason is that this ensures that your data never leaves your environment and that the compute is always close to your data.
You can learn more about how this setup in the infrastructure section of the documentation.
Can you run Polars Cloud on-premise?
Currently, Polars Cloud is only available to organizations that are on AWS. Support for on-premise infrastructure is on our roadmap and will become available soon.
What does Polars Cloud offer me beyond Polars?
Polars Cloud offers a managed service that enables scalable data processing with the flexibility and expressiveness of the Polars API. It extends the open source Polars project with the following capabilities:
- Distributed engine to scale workloads horizontally.
- Cost-optimized serverless architecture that automatically scales compute resources
- Built-in fault tolerance mechanisms ensuring query completion even during hardware failures or system interruptions
- Comprehensive monitoring and analytics tools providing detailed insights into query performance and resource utilization.
What are the main use cases for Polars Cloud?
Polars Cloud offers both a batch as an interactive mode to users. Batch mode can be used for ETL workloads or one-off large scale analytic jobs. Interactive mode is for users that are looking to do data exploration on a larger scale data processing that requires more compute than their own machine can offer.
How can Polars Cloud integrate with my workflow?
One of our key priorities is ensuring that running remote queries feels as native and seamless as running them locally. Every user should be able to scale their queries effortlessly.
Polars Cloud is completely environment agnostic. This allows you to run your queries from anywhere such as your own machine, Jupyter/Marimo notebooks, Airflow DAGs, AWS Lambda functions, or your servers. By not tying you to a specific platform, Polars Cloud gives you the flexibility to execute your queries wherever it best fits your workflow.
What is the pricing model of Polars Cloud?
Polars Cloud is available at no additional cost in this early stage. You only pay for the resources you use in your own cloud environment. We are exploring different usage based pricing models that are geared towards running queries as fast and efficient as possible.
Will the distributed engine be available in open source?
The distributed engine is only available in Polars Cloud. There are no plans to make it available in the open source project. Polars is focused on single node compute, as it makes efficient use of the available resources. Users already report utilizing Polars to process hundreds of gigabytes of data on single (large) compute instance. The distributed engine is geared towards teams and organizations that are I/O bound or want to scale their Polars queries beyond single machines.