Introduction:

According to Gartner, "Alibaba Cloud has the broadest functionality coverage among non-U.S.-based vendors in this Magic Quadrant. In some use cases, it surpasses U.S.-based leaders. Alibaba Cloud’s container services are widely adopted across Alibaba Group’s large e-commerce platform and ecosystem of companies. These companies provide a variety of digital services, which demonstrates the stability, scalability and maturity of Alibaba Cloud’s container services, particularly for AI and cloud-native applications. Alibaba Cloud has maintained the largest cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS) market share in China (where the vast majority of its revenue originates). Outside China, Alibaba Cloud also has a presence in the public cloud container services market in Southeast Asia."

Alibaba Cloud Container Service supports diverse architectures, including CPUs from Intel, AMD, and Yitian, as well as GPU accelerators. It enables various deployment models, including public cloud, private cloud, and hybrid cloud.

To meet the growing demand for Serverless computing, Alibaba Cloud launched Container Compute Service (ACS) in 2023, a new category of container compute product. At last year's Apsara Conference, ACS received a major upgrade, enabling more flexible, second-level auto-scaling with fine-grained increments of 0.5 vCPU and 1 GiB. It is capable of scaling out to 10,000 pods per minute.

Additionally, Alibaba Cloud Container Service for Kubernetes (ACK) is one of the first container service platforms in the world to achieve Kubernetes Conformance certification.

Meanwhile, Alibaba Cloud has also specifically upgraded its container products for the AI era. Container Service ACK has been optimized for AI workloads, reducing the cold start latency of large model applications by 85% and supporting ultra-large-scale clusters of up to 15,000 nodes. At the same time, Container Compute Service (ACS) launched GPU container capacity last year, enabling developers to launch large models in seconds and utilize AI computing power with high efficiency.

Currently, Alibaba Cloud's container services have been widely adopted across numerous industries:

- The Olympic Broadcasting Services (OBS) for the Paris 2024 Games has been fully migrated to Alibaba Cloud. Leveraging the high efficiency, stability, extreme elasticity, and security of containers, it marks a historic shift from satellite-based broadcasting to cloud-based broadcasting.

- RedNote utilizes Alibaba Cloud's container services to co-locate its online and offline workloads, resulting in a 45% increase in CPU utilization.

- Alibaba Cloud's Container Service (ACK) and Lingjun clusters support Moonshot AI's efficient and stable model training and inference, keeping the GPU resource idle rate below 0.5%.

Source: Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Container Management, 6 August 2025

Disclaimer: Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally, MAGIC QUADRANT is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.

This graphic was published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research document and should be evaluated in the context of the entire document. The Gartner document is available upon request from Alibaba.