Introduction:

In the Forrester Wave™: Serverless Development Platforms, Q2 2025, Alibaba Cloud, with its product capabilities of Function Compute (FC) and Serverless App Engine (SAE), has achieved the highest score possible (5 points) in 9 criteria out of 21 criteria. Alibaba Cloud has been ranked as a Leader and is also the only Chinese tech company to be recognized as a leader in this research.

This report assessed 11 vendors over six months, evaluating them across 21 criteria, including developer experience, partner ecosystem, API and event integration, AI application development, and vision.

The report says: 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. The platform excels with built-in observability, tracing, logging, and performance monitoring and offers a robust marketplace for third-party integrations. Alibaba Cloud demonstrates strategic strength in serverless development through sustained innovation, including a commitment to open source and reinforcement of ecosystem growth. Customers call out low latency, high availability, and excellent customer service support. The Forrester report noted that AI application development was a key focus area, with native support for model deployment and event-driven inference workflows.

Alibaba Cloud was the first cloud provider in China to offer Serverless computing services. In 2017, it launched Function Compute (FC), China's first FaaS product with millisecond-level elastic scaling, realizing event-driven fully managed computing services.

It eliminates the need for users to manage IaaS or Kubernetes, enabling instant deployment of code packages or Docker images. SAE automatically scales instances, charges based on usage, and provides out-of-the-box capabilities such as microservice governance, logging, and monitoring.

This year, Alibaba Cloud Function Compute (FC) launched Function AI—an all-in-one platform for AI application development and lifecycle management. It provides rich serverless + AI application templates, secondary development and cloud product integration, boosting R&D efficiency.

Function Compute (FC) powers Alibaba Cloud Bailian and ModelScope Community with model inference and training support, as well as elastic invocation capabilities for Agent and MCP services.

Serverless App Engine (SAE) delivers support for Dify Community and Pro editions hosting service, based on Serverless architecture, supporting enterprise-level needs such as rapid model iteration and workflow optimization.

Alibaba Cloud Serverless Computing has empowered over 10,000 enterprises:

- Weibo uses Function Compute for image processing, handling billions of personalized image operations daily with a 35% reduction in overall costs.

- iQiyi Sports relies on SAE's elasticity to manage live event traffic surges, achieving 40% higher Ops efficiency and 50% better resource utilization.

- Semir leverages Function Compute's AI image generation for fashion design, reducing the original design process time from 2-3 days to just 30 seconds.