Alibaba Cloud named leader in Forrester Wave serverless report
Alibaba Cloud has been recognised as a Leader in The Forrester Wave: Serverless Development Platforms, Q2 2025 report, following a six-month evaluation of 11 vendors across multiple criteria.
The report, published by Forrester, assessed serverless development platforms on 21 criteria, such as developer experience, partner ecosystem, API and event-driven integration, AI application development, and overall vision. Alibaba Cloud achieved the highest score possible in nine areas, including initialisation and deployment, workload flexibility, observability, AI application development, and innovation.
Serverless focus
Alibaba Cloud's serverless platform incorporates its Function Compute and Serverless App Engine products. According to the report, these platforms deliver scalable, event-driven computing and offer integration throughout the Alibaba ecosystem. The report highlighted Alibaba Cloud's position as a market front-runner across China and the broader Asia-Pacific region, combining localised innovation with wide scale enterprise adoption.
Alibaba Cloud's approach to serverless development has been marked by support for diverse workloads, flexibility, and a focus on enabling businesses in a range of sectors, including eCommerce, manufacturing, education, media and entertainment, gaming, and the internet. The company has confirmed that its serverless offerings have supported more than 10,000 enterprises worldwide.
Jiangwei Jiang, Vice President, General Manager of Infrastructure Products at Alibaba Cloud, said: "For us, this recognition from Forrester reflects Alibaba Cloud's continued focus on advancing serverless development. The development of AI applications remains a priority in our serverless solutions, as we strive to combine innovative cloud technologies with reliable customer support - helping businesses of all sizes adopt the latest advancements for their growth."
The Forrester report noted Alibaba Cloud's "strategic strength in serverless development through sustained innovation, including a commitment to open source and reinforcement of ecosystem growth." The report further found the company's serverless platform to be one of the most comprehensive on the market, and highlighted its capabilities in initialisation, deployment, and runtime flexibility. Particular emphasis was placed on Alibaba Cloud's support for AI application development, with native features for model deployment and event-driven inference workflows.
Product development
Alibaba Cloud launched Function Compute in 2017 as a managed, event-driven compute service designed to allow users to focus on developing business logic without the need to manage underlying infrastructure. The service operates on a pay-as-you-go basis, with the stated intention of enabling rapid development and iteration.
The Function Compute service underpins Alibaba Cloud's generative AI platform, Model Studio, and the open-source ModelScope Community, offering inference and training support along with elastic invocation capabilities for Agent and MCP services.
In addition, Serverless App Engine, described by Alibaba Cloud as the industry's first application-oriented serverless platform-as-a-service, provides hosting for applications across multiple programming languages. Built on Kubernetes architecture, it is intended to enable deployment of cloud-native applications quickly, whether from source code, packaged code, or Docker images.
Enterprise adoption
Alibaba Cloud stated that its serverless offerings have been adopted by organisations in varied industries. These solutions are used by enterprises ranging from eCommerce and media to education and manufacturing, in efforts to manage, scale, and develop digital operations in a cost-effective and efficient manner.
The inclusion in the Forrester Wave report and the ratings earned reflect Alibaba Cloud's ongoing efforts to deliver a flexible and feature-complete serverless environment, with a focus on enterprise and developer needs in an evolving cloud services landscape.
