Functions-As-A-Service Platforms

Forrester renamed this category in 2025, from Functions-As-A-Service Platforms to Serverless Development Platforms, and the final edition under the old name is The Forrester Wave: Functions-As-A-Service Platforms, Q2 2023. The old name's last scorecard carried a verdict the new name's first scorecard repeated: the same vendor on top, three editions running.

The final edition under this name: The Forrester Wave: Functions-As-A-Service Platforms, Q2 2023

Principal analyst Devin Dickerson announced the evaluation on June 8, 2023, with a scope decision that still defines the category: public cloud only. Edge-deployed FaaS was excluded and set aside for future research.

Nine vendors were scored against forty criteria, thirty two capability criteria across seven groups, developer experience, programming model, runtime execution environment, observability, integrations, security, and specialized workload support, plus eight strategy and market presence criteria. The field: Alibaba Cloud, Amazon Web Services, DigitalOcean, Google, Huawei Technologies, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and Tencent Cloud.

Dickerson's own summary of the market state: it "matured a great deal since the last Forrester Wave." Every vendor demonstrated strong offerings, though not consistently across all thirty two capabilities. Some leaned on third-party integrations instead of native features. Some had strong regional ecosystems and thinner global reach.

The leader from Hangzhou

Alibaba Cloud took the Leader spot for the second consecutive edition, with its Function Compute service earning the highest possible scores in twenty six of forty criteria and the highest Current Offering score in the field at 4.43 out of 5.

The citation reads like a serverless buyer's checklist. Built-in visual autoscaling configuration. Pricing granularity down to one-millisecond billing. GPU instance support. Comprehensive observability. An open-source community emphasis. Forrester's own note is the interesting one: customers in Asia Pacific see Function Compute as the obvious choice, while the rest of the field's strongest evidence is more regionally mixed.

Twenty six of forty is the number to remember. In a field where Dickerson says every vendor had strong offerings, the leader won by being the only one strong across all thirty two capability criteria, and the gap between that and the rest is what the tier column exists to show.

A field with no weak vendors

The 2023 field is the category's maturity certificate. A decade earlier, FaaS was a startup developer's convenience. By 2023 the same nine vendors that sell you your entire cloud were competing on millisecond billing granularity and GPU instance support.

The enterprise shift is visible in the criteria. The report says demand moved from cloud-born startups to large enterprises deploying production capabilities without managing Kubernetes clusters or application servers. The question stopped being "can I run a function" and became "can I run a production estate on functions, with observability and security, in my region."

The Q2 2021 edition was this category's first under the FaaS name, and Alibaba Cloud's consecutive placements bracket it: the 2023 report records a market that went from novelty to production infrastructure in two years. Dickerson's phrase, that the market "matured a great deal since the last Forrester Wave," is doing the work of a decade in one sentence.

That shift is also why the old name had to die. The scorecard under it kept scoring a narrow thing, functions, while the market kept buying a broader thing, the whole serverless development surface around the functions.

The name it took next

Where the market went is documented in the successor evaluation, The Forrester Wave: Serverless Development Platforms, Q2 2025, which scored eleven vendors against twenty one criteria. The rename is the finding: the category outgrew the function, and the scorecard followed the market.

The new Leaders are AWS, with the highest scores in both current offering and strategy, Microsoft, and Alibaba Cloud, the only Asia Pacific vendor in the top rung for the third consecutive edition, this time with the highest possible scores in nine of twenty one criteria.

The field widened under the new name: Google Cloud, Cloudflare, Fastly, Huawei, Oracle, Tencent Cloud, Akamai, and Yext joined the evaluation. Edge vendors entered exactly where the old name's scope had excluded them, and the criteria count halved, from forty to twenty one, while the market definition widened. That compression is the whole story of the rename: fewer, broader criteria for a bigger category.

What a buyer should carry over from the old scorecard

The honest limitation of the 2023 edition is structural. It scored functions in isolation, and nobody buys functions in isolation anymore. Its granular criteria, millisecond pricing, autoscaling configuration, GPU support, are still the right questions, but they now live inside a platform purchase that also includes containers, AI inference, and edge.

There is also the public record to respect. Only one Leader placement was publicly announced in 2023, and the tier positions of the other eight vendors never surfaced. This article names what was confirmed and nothing beyond it.

Three questions before you buy functions again

Are you buying a function runtime or a development platform? The rename is the question. If your team is past functions and into containers, AI inference, and edge delivery, the successor scorecard is your map, and the old one only covers part of your purchase. The old scorecard answers the runtime question. The new one answers the platform question, and the two answers can disagree about the same vendor.

Where does your estate actually run? The 2023 edition made regional strength visible in its citations. Ask for the vendor's regional evidence on your workloads, in your jurisdiction, not its global marketing numbers.

What happens at the billing boundary? One-millisecond granularity was a differentiator in 2023. Ask what the pricing looks like at your function volume, including cold starts and GPU minutes, because the scorecard cannot price your workload for you.

Forrester does not endorse any vendor named here, and tier placement should not be read as a recommendation to buy.

The adjacent shortlist item is Multicloud Managed Services Providers: this is the final scorecard Forrester published under this category name before merging it with application modernization research, and its top vendor's FinOps expertise is the detail that aged best.

Buyers evaluating this should also weigh Multicloud Container Platforms, the closest coverage already published on this site: kubernetes is free and standardized, so what these platforms actually sell is fleet discipline across hundreds of clusters, a VMware exodus, and the edge.