AI rightly has taken center stage in the public cloud platform market, but it’s not the only major transformation underway. First, cloud users are changing the way that they provision and consume cloud services, with serverless-first approaches gaining momentum. Second, sovereignty concerns are carving the market into regional and national components amid trade tensions. Each of these key trends are featured in the public cloud platform evaluative reports, the result of our collaboration over the past year to identity evaluation criteria in a rapidly changing technology environment and assess competitive differentiators.
The most recent of our reports, The Forrester Wave™: Public Cloud Platforms, Q4 2024, highlights how hyperscalers are remaking core infrastructure services for the generative AI (genAI) moment with a focus on data, even as they push up the tech stack to reach business users with AI-infused versions of services that operate largely beyond the boundaries of traditional enterprise IT. The Forrester Wave™: Public Cloud Platforms In China, Q3 2024, by Charlie Dai, shows Chinese cloud providers driving platform innovation AI services and foundation model support across several domains. The Forrester Wave™: Public Cloud Platforms In Europe, Q3 2024, by Dario Maisto, puts a spotlight on how European users’ (and their governments’) priorities on sovereignty and sustainability have created an opportunity for Europe-focused cloud providers to offer competitive options up and down the tech stack.
Forrester clients have access to the full reports. Here are some key points:
- The serverless-first (and often only) public cloud is here. Cloud providers and customers have been wrestling with both legacy technologies from data centers and the open-source complexity of cloud-native technologies such as Kubernetes and function as a service (FaaS). Today, Kubernetes and FaaS have become implementation details — checklist items for cloud customers who want services that provide a pipeline into nonproprietary open-source-based services but who don’t want or need to put resources into complex platform build-outs and integrations. The Chinese cloud providers are particularly innovative on this front, for example, with serverless machine learning/deep learning and support for mini-app mobile development.
- Digital sovereignty and cloud sustainability influence cloud procurement in Europe. European regulators are setting the pace on digital sovereignty and cloud sustainability. Here, digital sovereignty moves beyond the cloud infrastructure domain to involve hardware, software, network, and data, each with broader implications. The most obvious example is in-region (or, sometimes, in-country) data centers and supply chain controls. But a cloud provider that offers European operations physically, legally, and logically separated from the rest of the world isn’t necessarily a sovereign cloud vendor, which requires adherence to a mix of regulatory and certification regimes. Cloud sustainability is gaining traction, too, as providers face spiking energy usage from power-hungry genAI services. In both arenas, Europe is set to influence globally.
- Cloud AI moves from scattershot to orchestrated services. The requirements of genAI and the global scale of public cloud made it inevitable that hyperscalers would dominate the AI boom, albeit with disruptive upstarts and resurgent older tech providers getting into the mix, as well. Our evaluation of cloud provider AI offerings focuses heavily on the infrastructure firepower. We also looked at both AI-assisted TuringBot developer tools for general application development as well as others specifically for developing AI applications and agents. We paid particular attention to genAI-enabling technologies such as retrieval-augmented generation, which is often critical to move foundational models into production. While these services are not all yet generally available, the essentials are there for users who are prepared to accept complexity to achieve genAI results in the near term.
For more details, Forrester clients please read the global, Chinese, and European reports and book an inquiry or guidance session to discuss. If you’re not a client, be sure to attend the upcoming Predictions 2025 webinar on January 30.
