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Red Hat  Leader among 8 multi cloud container platform vendors in The Forrester Wave™

Posted on October 30, 2020

Red Hat-IBM, Google, And Rancher Lead The Pack 

Forrester’s research uncovered a market in which Red Hat-IBM, Google, and Rancher are Leaders; VMware, D2iQ, and Platform9 Systems are Strong Performers; and Mirantis and Canonical are Contenders.

As cloud-native technologies like containers and Kubernetes mature rapidly, they are becoming the preferred way to build new software experiences and modernize existing apps at scale and across clouds. Enterprise customers now seek container development platforms that accelerate and simplify the development and operations (DevOps) of cloud-native apps wherever and however firms build and deploy them.

Today’s multi cloud container development platforms (MCDPs) not only provide comprehensive container infrastructure lifecycle operations from the data center to the cloud to the edge; they also help developers modernize apps with integrated service catalogs and microservices, service mesh, and serverless features.

As a result of these trends, MCDP customers should look for a balanced blend of development and operations features that: 

› Simplify cloud-native app development with rich development services. 

The leading solutions draw developers in and jump-start both development and app modernization with microservices frameworks, serverless support, continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) integrations, dependency management, and app lifecycle management features like code quality checks and vulnerability scanning. Service mesh support further enhances security, robustness, and root-cause analysis for microservices at runtime. Top solutions help developers focus on business logic with comprehensive service catalogs and prebuilt DevOps automations and integration. 

› Enable distributed infrastructure operations from data center to cloud to edge. 

Enterprise workloads are increasingly distributed and hybrid. Most vendors in this evaluation offer modeldriven configuration, monitoring, security, and cluster lifecycle features for unified multi cloud cluster operations; some provide an enhanced control plane with cost management and distributed tracing, dashboarding, and auditing features to improve observability for operations teams. The best solutions extend operational control to the edge and support thousands of clusters. 

› Expand enterprise value with rich app and service partner ecosystems. 

Enterprises adopt cloud-native technologies to simultaneously support a range of developer needs, app use cases, and locations. Leading MCDP solutions curate, integrate, and enhance the most popular open source cloud-native technologies to address the broadest set of needs and augment them with a rich partner ecosystem. The best solutions offer broad partner service catalogs, integrations with public cloud and edge services, and multiple pricing and managed deployment options to meet enterprises where they are in their cloud-native journeys.

Evaluation Overview

The vendors were evaluated against 29 criteria and grouped into three high-level categories:

› Current offering. 

Each vendor’s position on the vertical axis of the Forrester Wave graphic indicates the strength of its current offering. Key criteria for these solutions include platform experience, service and application catalogs, microservice development support, service mesh support, serverless and function as a service support, DevOps automation, integration support, control plane configuration, cluster lifecycle operations, logging and monitoring, multi cloud deployment options, and edge computing support.

› Strategy. 

Placement on the horizontal axis indicates the strength of each vendor’s strategy. The evaluation was on enterprise strategy, roadmap and innovation, partner ecosystems, professional services strategy, open source strategy and pricing strategy.

› Market presence. 

Represented by the size of the markers on the graphic, the market presence scores reflect each vendor’s number of customers, product revenue, and revenue growth.

Reference : 

The Forrester Wave™: Multi Cloud Container Development Platforms, Q3 2020 Report on Vendor Analysis