[Analyst Report] The Forrester Wave: Serverless Development Platforms, Q2 2025

Leaders

Amazon Web Services

Amazon Web Services (AWS), anchored by AWS Lambda, provides a mature foundation for event-driven application development with extensive integrations across the AWS ecosystem. AWS continues to evolve its serverless portfolio for market demands including the growing influence of AI workloads and a reduced focus on pure FaaS.

1. Strategy. AWS has a clear and cohesive vision that aligns serverless capabilities across its expansive cloud portfolio. Its innovation strategy is tightly coupled with customer feedback and reinforced through sustained R&D investment. While AWS continues to evolve, its serverless roadmap is largely incremental and comparable with peers’. Similarly, pricing is competitive but not differentiated, requiring customers to weigh value against predictability and complexity.
2. Capabilities. AWS offers strong capabilities across developer experiences, tools, and service integrations. Developers benefit from mature software development kits (SDKs), command-line interface tools, and infrastructure-as-code options. AWS distinguishes itself with rich support for stateful workflows, native storage integrations, and powerful observability. Its APIs and event-driven integrations are among the best, enabling complex, scalable architectures and workflows. While the sheer breadth of services introduces complexity, AWS focuses on providing flexible building blocks to support a wide range of use cases.
3. Customer feedback. Reference customers mentioned a steep initial learning curve but positively called out robust service integrations and the ability to orchestrate large, complex applications.
4. Forrester’s take. AWS’s platform completeness and integration depth are notable, making it well suited for organizations seeking to build production-grade event-driven applications at scale with granularity and control.

Google Cloud

Google Cloud, anchored by Cloud Run, provides a streamlined and flexible approach to deploying containerized workloads. Strong alignment between product direction and developer needs — reflected in clear messaging, intuitive tooling, and rapid iteration — establish it as a Leader.

1. Strategy. Google Cloud’s serverless strategy centers on a clear articulate vision that positions Cloud Run as the developer-first center of its container platforms offerings. The platform benefits from strong product leadership, focused innovation, and increased investment, driving capabilities. The roadmap is a strategic strength, emphasizing workload flexibility across event-driven, HTTP, and long-running use cases. Adoption is steadily rising, supported by stronger momentum with enterprise developers, though it remains on par with peers’. Pricing is competitive, offering predictable scaling models.
2. Capabilities. Google Cloud’s serverless offerings, anchored by Cloud Run, provide a unified platform for deploying functions and containerized applications. The platform offers strong workload flexibility by supporting HTTP services, background jobs, and long-running processes. Cloud Run stands out for its native AI application development. While its container-native model provides consistency and portability, its developer experience is on par with peers.
3. Customer feedback. Reference customers highlighted the opinionated stack and its positive impact on developer velocity while noting a learning curve to optimize their applications for cost and scalability.
4. Forrester’s take. Google Cloud Run especially well suits deployment-agnostic serverless-first development across a variety of use cases that include backend APIs, data processing pipelines, and modern AI-powered applications. 

Microsoft

Microsoft’s platform, including Azure Functions and Container Apps, has taken a significant leap forward in capability by unifying event-driven and container-based models under a cohesive strategy. Microsoft’s commitment to driving value with application services strengthens its position for developers building within the broader Microsoft ecosystem.

1. Strategy. Microsoft’s serverless vision reflects its broader focus on enabling cloud-native application development through tightly integrated service offerings. A strong focus on AI and tools that support AI-assisted development and inference bolster its innovation. Note that Azure’s serverless adoption is middle of the road and its positioning is still evolving. Despite this, Microsoft’s scale, product breadth, and enterprise reach give it a strong foundation as a Leader.
2. Capabilities. Microsoft’s serverless platforms offer a mature feature-rich environment with strong programming language and runtime support. Microsoft distinguishes its serverless offerings in workload and network isolation, offering both single and multitenant options and a strong track record in regulated industries. Native integration with Active Directory and granular role-based access control buoy security and permissions. AI application development is a strength, with native access to Azure OpenAI and ML tooling that can embed directly into serverless workflows.
3. Customer feedback. Reference customers highlighted autoscaling and high availability as strengths while suggesting technical support has room for improvement.
4. Forrester’s take. Microsoft is well positioned for enterprise-grade applications, particularly those that seek to take advantage of Azure-native services and development frameworks.

Alibaba Cloud

Alibaba Cloud’s platforms, including Function Compute and Serverless App Engine, deliver scalable event-driven computing with strong integration across the Alibaba ecosystem. As a market front-runner in China and the broader APAC region, Alibaba Cloud combines localized innovation with broad enterprise adoption.

1. Strategy. Alibaba Cloud demonstrates strategic strength in serverless development through sustained innovation, including a commitment to open source and reinforcement of ecosystem growth. Its roadmap and vision are on par with global peers’. Alibaba Cloud’s regional focus is a strength in its core market but limits it in terms of global evaluation. Nonetheless, Alibaba Cloud is a key serverless provider in its geography, with strong alignment among innovation, platform maturity, and market demand.
2. Capabilities. Alibaba Cloud offers one of the most comprehensive serverless platforms in the market, with strong capabilities across initialization, deployment, and runtime flexibility. Its open-source sandbox and platform-agnostic serverless framework implementation enables portability and streamlined onboarding without sacrificing usability. The platform excels with built-in observability, tracing, logging, and performance monitoring and offers a robust marketplace for third-party integrations. AI application development was a key focus area, with native support for model deployment and event-driven inference workflows.
3. Customer feedback. Customers call out low latency, high availability, and excellent customer service support but noted initial challenges with network configuration.
4. Forrester’s take. Alibaba Cloud particularly well suits the APAC region, where it should be considered the market lead for building serverless web services, data pipelines, or AI-driven applications at scale. 

Strong Performers

Cloudflare

Cloudflare’s platform, centered on Workers, offers a lightweight globally distributed execution model. With a focus on developer experience, global reach, and tight integrations with web security and networking services, Cloudflare has carved out a distinct position.

1. Strategy. Cloudflare’s serverless strategy is rooted in a clear vision prioritizing performance, proximity, and developer simplicity. Its roadmap reflects a deliberate and focused effort to close feature gaps with hyperscale cloud providers, though this comes at the expense of pushing innovation in some cases. The roadmap expands core capabilities to differentiate its edge computing message while broadening platform entry points. The pricing for Cloudflare workers is on par with competitors’, but some data services needed to build full-stack applications are expensive relative to competitors’ in the public cloud.
2. Capabilities. Cloudflare Workers delivers an exceptional developer experience with fast deployment, familiar tooling, and native integration into a growing Cloudflare ecosystem, especially for frontend web and AI applications. Cloudflare’s 100% uptime service-level agreement is a unique strength that further reinforces its reliability for critical latency-sensitive workloads. However, workload flexibility is limited because Workers are the primary execution model, with constrained support for longer-running or non-HTTP workloads (enhancements for runtime duration were delivered after the evaluation deadline). Features like observability are still maturing, and options for fine-grained workload isolation remain limited, compared with traditional cloud providers.
3. Customer feedback. Reference customers highlighted Cloudflare’s positive impact on developer velocity and strong developer tooling while noting challenges around integrating Cloudflare environments with their other cloud platforms.
4. Forrester’s take. Cloudflare well suits edge-first applications, APIs, and performance-critical user-facing services.

Tencent Cloud

Tencent Cloud’s Serverless Cloud Framework supports a wide range of application scenarios but historically is most known for its ubiquitous support of the WeChat ecosystem in China. Its strong regional infrastructure and service integration in the APAC region is tightly tailored to the unique demands of its market focus.

1. Strategy. Tencent Cloud demonstrates an on-par market vision, steady innovation, and a roadmap that aligns reasonably well with industry trends. A significant strength is adoption, particularly through integration with WeChat, making it one of the most ubiquitous development platforms in China. However, for customers outside of this region, the partner ecosystem is currently limited. Tencent Cloud is actively pivoting to enterprise solutions and has seen some success with notable clients. This strategic shift is ongoing and may bear fruit in enhancing its presence outside of the WeChat ecosystem.
2. Capabilities. Tencent Cloud’s Serverless Cloud Functions maintain parity with its competitors in most areas such as developer experience and programming language support. However, the platform faces challenges in state management and first-party storage options. Additionally, demonstrations showed performance issues with cold starts and scaling during function initialization. Addressing these issues would enhance the company’s competitive stance and broaden its appeal for enterprise application scenarios.
3. Customer feedback. Tencent Cloud customers call out predictable costs and ease of infrastructure management as pluses but noted challenges with connectivity and latency.
4. Forrester’s take. Tencent Cloud well suits developers looking to unlock the WeChat ecosystem in China.

Fastly

Fastly’s serverless platform provides a high-performance edge-native execution environment designed for low-latency, performance-sensitive web and mobile applications.

1. Strategy. Fastly has a clear vision for delivering high-performing applications by leveraging its global content delivery network (CDN) and points of presence. Its innovation strategy is on par with peers’ while benefiting from natural synergies with the web security side of its business. The platform’s roadmap focuses on expanding language support and enhancing developer tooling and AI use cases. However, Fastly’s partner ecosystem is limited. Compute has yet to achieve the market penetration of some competitors despite strong developer messaging. Fastly’s strategic direction positions it well for edge-native web applications, but accelerating adoption will be critical for continued success.
2. Capabilities. Fastly offers a streamlined developer experience with rapid deployment. Leveraging its extensive global network, it ensures automatic scaling and low-latency responses while minimizing cold starts with its WebAssembly-based runtime. However, the platform has limitations in workload flexibility because it only supports functions, which may not accommodate all use cases. Observability features, state and storage, and integrations are still evolving. Despite this, Fastly helps customers build and deploy applications requiring high performance across a globally distributed footprint.
3. Customer feedback. Fastly customers frequently call out excellent customer service and the speed of the network as positives but usually note a lack of choices in runtime flexibility.
4. Forrester’s take. Fastly well suits web and mobile development of applications that benefit from its global footprint and robust CDN. 

Contenders

Huawei Cloud

Huawei Cloud’s platform, with FunctionGraph at the core, reflects the company’s focused investment in serverless as a key pillar of its cloud strategy. Positioned across its stack to serve the growing needs of developers in China and emerging markets, Huawei Cloud navigates geopolitical hurdles in the west by emphasizing open standards integration.

1. Strategy. Huawei Cloud’s product strategy for serverless centers on FunctionGraph as a core component of a broader vision for hybrid and multicloud. Recent improvements in taking a more holistic approach to serve capabilities have elevated Huawei Cloud’s market vision and innovation to be on par with global competitors’. However, geopolitical constraints remain a major concern, and a concentrated regional focus continues to limit its international adoption and hampers access to the broader partnership ecosystem. As a result, while Huawei Cloud offers a competitive platform, its global reach greatly lags more established hyperscale providers.
2. Capabilities. Huawei Cloud’s FunctionGraph enhances developer experience by offering more language support and enhancing its development plug-ins for tools like VS Code. This further cements its capabilities for local development and hybrid cloud. However, deployment performance shows inconsistencies, and customers may experience challenges without tuning their workloads for efficiency. Additionally, the platform’s marketplace and integration capabilities remain limited, reflecting broader strategic challenges in expanding its ecosystem.
3. Customer feedback. Huawei Cloud customers call out portability and the ability to run large-scale applications on the platform as positives but noted that documentation can be scarce.
4. Forrester’s take. Huawei Cloud well suits serverless development focused on emerging underserved markets.

 Yext

Yext’s serverless capabilities, delivered as part of a larger digital experiences motion, are optimized for edge-based web workloads. The platform well suits its focus area, which highly targets web development companies and service providers rather than direct to enterprise.

1. Strategy. Yext’s serverless strategy tightly focuses on the edge, particularly for content-rich applications. This specialization supports strong execution within its niche but limits broader applicability, highlighted by on-par scores for vision, adoption, and partner ecosystem. The platform’s emphasis on packaged solutions and integrator-led delivery constrains its ability to iterate broadly, contributing to a below-par innovation posture and roadmap. While highly effective for its target audience, the strategy reflects a deliberate trade-off between depth in a narrow domain and breadth across a wider serverless market.
2. Capabilities. Yext’s serverless capabilities well suit its narrow focus on edge-rendered web experiences, which are solid in developer experience, tooling, and cold-start performance — but primarily for web development service providers. The platform is optimized for simplicity and speed in deploying content-driven fleets of web pages. However, this focused approach has led to functional gaps, with no native support for state management, limited storage, and lack of capabilities in workload isolation. Observability is also limited or nonexistent, making Yext not suitable for general-purpose serverless workloads.
3. Customer feedback. Yext customers call out predictable monthly costs and strong customer service as strengths while noting the platform’s lack of flexibility for certain use cases.
4. Forrester’s take. Yext suits developing serverless dynamically rendered web experiences at the edge. 

 Oracle

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) offers a serverless platform, OCI Functions, focused on security and portability. It is based on the open-source Fn Project, allowing deployment across various cloud environments and on-premises systems.

1. Strategy. OCI’s serverless strategy reflects a conservative and infrastructure-focused approach that has seen limited evolution in recent years. This shows in below-par scores for vision, innovation, roadmap, and adoption and indicates that serverless development is not a strategic priority in Oracle’s broader portfolio. While the pricing model is standard and competitive with peers’ and the platform inherits the partnership footprint of the larger OCI portfolio, little visible investment or market momentum ties to the Fn Project-based product.
2. Capabilities. OCI Functions provide a serverless platform that supports multiple programming languages through its Function Development Kits. However, the platform’s developer tooling and SDKs lag competitors. Relative to others evaluated, developers can expect a trickier onboarding process and less sample code and blueprints to help them get started. OCI Functions offer basic integration with monitoring and logging, but observability tooling is less mature and developer-centric relative to competitors’. Deployment processes have fallen behind and are less streamlined than rival platforms’. They currently lack native integrations with core elements of the OCI ecosystem, including AI services.
3. Customer feedback. OCI customers give Functions high marks for performance and documentation but note concerning latency issues and a lack of support for diverse instance types and runtime models. Oracle did not provide reference customers for this evaluation.
4. Forrester’s take. OCI Functions suit existing Oracle customers who need a serverless development option as part of their OCI stack. 

Akamai Technologies

Akamai Technologies is a traditional CDN player with a strong enterprise foundation. While not traditionally developer focused, emerging serverless offerings including EdgeWorkers and EdgeKV aim to bring more development use cases into its ecosystem.

1. Strategy. Akamai Technologies’ strategy builds on its established position in edge infrastructure, aiming to extend the performance and security benefits its enterprise customers rely on. The relative lack of movement from the company in terms of announcements and enhancements is evidenced in the below-par vision, roadmap, and innovation scores. However, some recent moves, such as its partnership with Fermyon, suggest potential that it could shore up its story over the next year. This would evolve it into a more developer-centric platform.
2. Capabilities. Akamai Technologies’ current serverless offering benefits from the company’s global infrastructure, resulting in consistent cold-start performance and global deployments at scale. However, developer experience is still maturing, with tooling sparse for some feature sets like API and event-driven integrations. These gaps hamper developers in engaging with the platform. While the underlying edge network is highly robust, the surrounding developer ecosystem is still nascent but set to expand with new partnerships and investment.
3. Customer feedback. Customers repeatedly mention Akamai Technologies’ service support as a strength but also note complexity orchestrating intricate applications on the platform. Akamai did not provide reference customers for this evaluation.
4. Forrester’s take. Akamai Technologies suits enterprise customers seeking to build serverless extensions to global applications leveraging its edge network.

Evaluation Overview

We evaluated vendors against three categories:

1. Current offering. Each vendor’s position on the vertical axis of the Forrester Wave graphic indicates the strength of its current offering.
2. Strategy. Placement on the horizontal axis indicates the strength of the vendors’ strategies, including elements such as vision and innovation.
3. Customer feedback. A halo on a vendor’s marker indicates above-average customer feedback relative to the other evaluated vendors. A double halo indicates outstanding customer feedback: We consider the vendor to be a Customer Favorite. As part of this evaluation, we speak with up to three customers of each vendor. We also consider customer input from our previous research.

Vendor Inclusion Criteria

Each of the vendors we included in this assessment has:

1. Broad enterprise-level support for serverless development functionality. The vendor natively provides all core functions for this space and has a demonstrated track record for supporting large enterprises.
2. A solution available for purchase as a standalone product. The product has its own SKU and pricing. It is not solely available as a free feature within a larger portfolio.
3. Substantial serverless development platform revenue. The vendor has at least $10 million in annual revenue from the serverless development platform product in the past four quarters.
4. Mindshare among Forrester’s enterprise clients. Forrester clients frequently mention the product as one they are considering or shortlisting prior to a purchase. We have heard about the product from our clients in the form of inquiries, advisories, consulting engagements, and other interactions over the past 12 months. Other vendors frequently mention this vendor as a competitor in the market.

Other Notable Vendors

The Forrester Wave evaluation is an assessment of the top vendors in the market; it doesn’t represent the entire vendor landscape. You’ll find more information about this market and additional vendors that Forrester considers to be notable for enterprise clients in our corresponding report: The Serverless Development Platforms Landscape, Q1 2025. Serverless development platforms customers may be familiar with or considering the following vendor, which we did not evaluate in this report:

1. Red Hat. Red Hat OpenShift Serverless is built on Knative and allows enterprise customers to run serverless functions on Kubernetes. We did not evaluate it because it is not offered as a discrete service and does not have a separate SKU or pricing from the OpenShift platform.

Supplemental Material

The Forrester Wave Methodology

A Forrester Wave is a guide for buyers considering their purchasing options in a technology marketplace. To offer an equitable process for all participants, Forrester follows The Forrester Wave™ Methodology to evaluate participating vendors.

In our review, we conduct primary research to develop a list of vendors to consider for the evaluation. From that initial pool of vendors, we narrow our final list based on the inclusion criteria. We then gather details of product and strategy through a detailed questionnaire, demos and briefings, and interviews with customers (vendors may provide up to three reference customers; we also consider feedback from other customers we’ve spoken with). We use those inputs, along with the analyst’s experience and expertise in the marketplace, to score vendors, using a relative rating system that compares each vendor against the others in the evaluation.