Google Cloud is a Leader in The Forrester Wave: Public Cloud Container Platforms, Q1 2022

We’re thrilled to share the news that leading global research and advisory firm Forrester Research has named Google Cloud a Leader in the recently published report The Forrester Wave^TM: Public Cloud Container Platforms, Q1 2022. Forrester evaluated the container and cloud-native offerings of a select group of top public cloud container platform vendors across 29 comprehensive criteria. 

We are proud that Forrester evaluated the strength and cohesion of our offerings, including Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), Cloud Run, Anthos, Cloud Build, Cloud Deploy, Cloud Code and more, writing that, “Google Cloud is the best fit for firms that want extensive cutting-edge cloud-native capabilities for distributed workloads spanning public cloud, private cloud, and multicloud environments.” 

Google Cloud received the highest possible scores in the criteria of service and application catalogs, microservice development support, service mesh support, serverless and FaaS support, DevOps automation, container image support, control plane configuration, hybrid cloud support, container networking, product vision, supporting products and services, market approach, revenue, and breadth of offering. We also achieved the highest score in the Strategy category of all the vendors evaluated.

Google Cloud is all-in on containers and cloud native 

The cloud-native tools and technologies created by Google Cloud are already powering the most innovative, scalable and secure apps around the world, from the most exciting digital natives to the most important enterprise industry leaders. Why? Cloud native means building and running modern apps that intentionally take advantage of the global scale, pervasive automation, elastic infrastructure, and secure resiliency of the public cloud. 

For enterprises, cloud native in practice means using containers, Kubernetes, serverless, and DevOps automation to build amazing customer-facing apps quickly, to modernize existing business-critical apps safely, and to operate them all on cost-efficient, powerful, and secure cloud infrastructure globally.

Dedicated to simplicity, speed, and scale for your modern apps

Our mission is to create, integrate, scale, and secure the best open source and commercial cloud-native technologies – backed by a consistent cloud control plane – so you can spend more time dreaming of ways to delight your customers and less time building and operating platforms. We are committed to leading in cloud-native open source communities and making containers and Kubernetes accessible to everyone, from everywhere. 

Here are a few recent highlights across our container services and tools, aimed at helping you build and modernize your most important apps with cloud native:

The most scalable fully managed Kubernetes service, Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), achieved an overall solution score of 92 out of 100 in Gartner’s Solution Scorecard. In 2021, we introduced GKE Autopilot, a fully managed, security-hardened Kubernetes service optimized for production workloads. This unique mode of operation allows you to focus on your workloads while Google manages your cluster infrastructure. There’s nothing else like it. Then, we made GKE apps even faster with GKE image streaming. With proven scalability to 15K nodes in a single cluster and innovations such as four-way autoscaling, node auto-upgrades, integrated logging and metrics, cost optimization insights, native backup and restore, and multi-instance GPUs to accelerate machine learning workloads, GKE remains the best choice in managed Kubernetes services.

With Cloud Run, we expanded the range of users who benefit from containers to those who don’t know much about them. Introduced in 2019, Cloud Run combines the serverless attributes of autoscaling and developer experience with the flexibility of containers. Developers can use any language, runtime or binary, and deploy code using buildpacks to automatically build container images from source without worrying about provisioning machines and clusters. Cloud Run goes beyond FaaS and beyond earlier generations of serverless computing. Cloud Run runs more legacy workloads, integrates with Cloud Build for secure and compliant builds, offers deeper cost controls and billing flexibility, and encourages portability. We added support for social feeds, collaborative editing, and multiplayer games that use bidirectional streaming. Minimum instances reduce cold-start delays so you can run more latency-sensitive applications. And recently, we launched support for network file systems, allowing developers to share and persist data between multiple containers and services.

Anthos is at the heart of the Google Distributed Cloud, a portfolio of software and hardware solutions announced in 2021 that extend Google’s container platform services to the data center and the edge. Anthos is how we extend GKE to wherever you need cloud-native apps. Manage clusters on-premises on bare metal and VMware-virtualized servers, on AWS and Azure, and at the edge – all with a Google Cloud-backed control plane for consistent, automated operations at scale. We added a hosted service for configuration management to keep all your clusters in sync, and trimmed our installation footprint and streamlined cluster management with a new multi-cloud API that enables you to use a single API for full lifecycle management of Anthos Kubernetes clusters in AWS or Azure.

Finally, since no public cloud container platform is complete without powerful DevOps tools, we expanded our CI/CD offerings to make your developers even more productive, wherever they build and deploy cloud native apps. Use Cloud Code and Cloud Shell as your go-to cloud-native IDEs. Cloud Build is a fully managed serverless DevOps automation platform for use cases spanning CI/CD, Infrastructure-as-Code, AI/MLOps, and more, across infrastructure GKE, Cloud Run, Cloud Functions and more. Google Cloud Deploy is a fully managed continuous delivery service that provides one-click release promotion and roll-backs, built-in metrics, and out-of-the-box security. Artifact Registry and Container Analysis provide managed artifact repositories, vulnerability scanning, and help secure the software supply chain.

We are delighted and humbled to be recognized as a Leader in public cloud container platforms by Forrester. Grab your copy of The Forrester Wave^TM: Public Cloud Container Platforms, Q1 2022 today and let us know how we can help you build and modernize your most important apps how you want and where you want.