Which Serverless Platform Leads the Market? Inside Forrester’s 2021 FaaS Wave

Forrester has defined 40 standards to assess the capabilities of Serverless (FaaS) services, providing a benchmark for newcomers to evaluate the effectiveness of Serverless adoption.

Forrester Wave™: Function as a Service (FaaS) Platforms – Q1 2021

FaaS platforms enable developers to quickly create cloud‑native services

The abstraction offered by FaaS frees developers from managing complex container or VM clusters, allowing them to write micro‑services as simple functions in familiar languages such as Java, C#, JavaScript, or Python. Providers automatically scale these functions based on demand, reducing infrastructure overhead and accelerating time‑to‑deployment.

Support for both function and container packaging (ZIP/JAR or OCI‑compatible containers) to maximize flexibility for web, content, and event‑driven workloads.

Robust security features, including VPC‑isolated access and fast resource provisioning without cold‑start delays.

Integration with third‑party ecosystems and open standards for observability, event binding, and messaging.

Evaluation Summary

The Forrester Wave™ assessment places vendors into Leaders, Strong Performers, Contenders, and Challengers. The report is intended as a starting point; customers are encouraged to use the provided Excel comparison tool to adjust weighting criteria.

Vendor Products

The evaluation covers nine vendors: Alibaba, Amazon, Google, Huawei, IBM, Microsoft, Nimbella, Oracle, and Tencent.

Leaders

Amazon leads in geographic coverage, ecosystem breadth, and execution stability. AWS Lambda offers fine‑grained (1 ms) billing, EFS support, OCI‑compatible containers, and strong security for serverless workloads.

Alibaba excels with container support, open‑standard integrations (OpenTracing, OpenTelemetry, Grafana, Jaeger), 1 ms billing, and strong video‑processing capabilities.

Microsoft Azure Functions provides multi‑language support, Durable Functions, and deep integration with Azure services, though advanced features require a higher‑priced plan.

Strong Performers

Tencent Cloud SCF offers a web‑based development suite, multiple language runtimes, AI workload support, and seamless integration with the WeChat ecosystem.

Nimbella delivers a hybrid‑cloud “FaaS everywhere” approach based on Apache OpenWhisk, supporting diverse runtimes and long‑running functions.

Google combines Cloud Functions and Cloud Run, offering strong observability via Cloud Ops and flexible deployment options, including Knative‑based containers.

Contenders

Oracle focuses on security‑by‑design, OCI‑compatible container packaging, and broad regional availability, positioning its Cloud Functions as a solid choice for OCI‑centric enterprises.

Challengers

Huawei FunctionGraph provides multi‑language support and up to 15‑minute execution times, but suffers from limited documentation, regional availability, and incomplete feature sets.

Evaluation Report Overview

Current product : Assessed on developer experience, programming model, runtime environment, and security features.

Strategic vision : Evaluated on roadmap, execution capability, ecosystem participation, and pricing strategy.

Market share : Indicated by circle size, reflecting geographic reach, customer base, and revenue.

Vendor Selection Criteria

Must have an operational FaaS platform capable of running production workloads.

Must have participated in Forrester’s Now Tech Serverless vendor assessment.

Supplementary Materials

Online Resources

An Excel file containing all Forrester Wave™ scores and weighting factors is available for download from the Forrester website.

Forrester Wave™ Evaluation Method

The methodology follows the Forrester Wave™ guidelines, involving initial research, vendor shortlisting, detailed questionnaires, demos, and customer interviews, culminating in a relative scoring system.

Code of Conduct

All research, including this Forrester Wave™ assessment, adheres to the published Code of Conduct on the Forrester website.