Alibaba Cloud, the digital technology and intelligence backbone of Alibaba Group, has been named a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Functions-As-A-Service Platforms, Q2 2023. 

The report states that Functions-As-A-Service (FaaS) platforms should deliver a “world-class developer experience, provide robust security capabilities and enable everyday use cases with enhanced workload portability.” Vendors in the Wave, including Alibaba Cloud’s Function Compute were evaluated across 40 criteria grouped into three high-level categories – Current Offering, Strategy, and Market Presence. Alibaba obtained the highest score (4.43 out of 5.00) in the Current Offering category. 

Key features of Function Compute were noted in the report, including its built-in visual autoscaling configuration capabilities, granular pricing models, user adoption strategy and emphasis on open source community support. Its ability to accommodate “web use cases, content-centric workloads and portability across hybrid environments” was also mentioned.

“As digitalisation deepens across the business world, the ability to seamlessly build serverless applications is only going to grow in importance. Our efforts to support the enterprises and developer community with a secure and flexible FaaS platform have, in our opinion, been recognised in this latest Forrester evaluation and we believe it reflects the progress we are making. We look forward to continuing to invest in our capabilities and innovate new ways to push the boundaries of our serverless product offerings,” said Jiangwei Jiang, Senior Researcher and General Manager of Infrastructure Products, Alibaba Cloud Intelligence.

Alibaba Cloud’s serverless computing platform Function Compute for highly simplified, scalable and efficient infrastructure 

Alibaba Cloud’s Function Compute is a fully managed, event-driven compute service which alleviates users from managing their own infrastructure. Its secure and stable, pay-as-you-go platform is designed to simplify the computing experience to enable faster development and iteration of business logic and core code. The FaaS platform also scales and mobilises computing resources within milliseconds to handle spikes in online traffic, delivering reliable performance over time.

Function Compute has a proven track record across a variety of use cases, which include supporting online events, audio and video content, gaming and e-commerce, among others. One example is HEROZ, a Japanese artificial intelligence company providing solutions to a range of sectors, which was looking for a solution to lower its operations and maintenance (O&M) costs as well as better manage its peak and off-peak computing traffic periods. HEROZ adopted Function Compute to enhance its computing stability, improve the user experience while reducing churn, and lower its O&M costs.

Sampras (HK) Limited, Alibaba Cloud’s Hong Kong-based web development solutions partner, offers a wide range of services with an expertise in mobile platform and social media integrations. Together with Function Compute, Sampras products help businesses lower costs and optimise their support for e-commerce activity, covering flash sales, lotteries, and virtual queuing. 

Alibaba Cloud recently introduced a 3-month free trial program of Function Compute. Global customers can try deploying their applications and services on Function Compute for serverless computing experience.