Alibaba Cloud, the digital technology and intelligence backbone of Alibaba Group, has been named a pioneer in The Forrester Wave: Serverless Development Platforms, Q2 2025 report.
The report assessed 11 vendors over six months, evaluating them across 21 criteria, including developer experience, partner ecosystem, API and event-driven integration, AI application development, and vision.
Alibaba Cloud, with its Function Compute and Serverless App Engine product capabilities, achieved the highest score possible (5 points) in 9 out of 21 criteria, including initialization and deployment, workload flexibility, observability, AI application development, and innovation, among others.
Alibaba Cloud’s platforms
Alibaba Cloud combines localized innovation with broad enterprise adoption
Jiangwei Jiang, Vice President, General Manager of Infrastructure Products, 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 report stated that 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.
Serverless development
According to the report, Alibaba Cloud demonstrates strategic strength in serverless development through sustained innovation, including a commitment to open source and reinforcement of ecosystem growth.
In terms of capabilities, Alibaba Cloud offers one of the most comprehensive serverless platforms in the market, with strong capabilities across initialization, deployment, and runtime flexibility. AI application development was a key focus area, with native support for model deployment and event-driven inference workflows.
Constant innovation
Alibaba Cloud’s Function Compute is a fully managed, event-driven compute service
Launched in 2017, Alibaba Cloud’s Function Compute is a fully managed, event-driven compute service which alleviates users from managing their own infrastructure.
Its secure and stable, pay-as-you-go platform is designed to simplify the computing experience to enable faster development and iteration of business logic and core code.
Function Compute powers Alibaba Cloud’s generative AI development platform, Model Studio, and open-source ModelScope Community with model inference and training support, as well as elastic invocation capabilities for Agent and MCP services.
Serverless App Engine
Alibaba Cloud Serverless App Engine (SAE) is the industry’s first application-oriented serverless PaaS, providing a cost-effective and highly efficient one-stop application hosting solution.
This Kubernetes-based cloud product combines the serverless architecture & the microservice model, allowing users to deploy an online application in any programming language to SAE within seconds by using source code, a code package, or a Docker image.
Alibaba Cloud serverless solutions have supported over 10,000 enterprises worldwide across sectors including e-commerce, manufacturing, education, media and entertainment, internet, gaming, among others.
