Magic Quadrant for Container Management

Container Management Vendor Product Comparisons 2023

Key features and pros and cons of top Container Management products:

Alibaba Cloud - Leader

Pros:

Broad Product Portfolio: Alibaba Cloud has the broadest product portfolio of any non-U.S.-based vendor in this Magic Quadrant. In some use cases, it surpasses U.S.-based leaders. In particular, Alibaba Cloud has advanced products in hybrid cloud and edge solutions through ACK@Edge, Apsara Stack and CloudBox.
Alibaba Group's Extensive Use: Alibaba Cloud's container services are broadly used by Alibaba Group's large e-commerce platform and ecosystem of companies that have demanding requirements, which demonstrates the stability and maturity of Alibaba Cloud's container services.
Market Share in China: Alibaba Cloud has the largest cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS) market share in Asia, especially in China (where the vast majority of its revenue originates). Alibaba Cloud is growing its presence in the public cloud container service market in China and Southeast Asia by leveraging its large IaaS market share and demonstrating the ability to handle a wide range of user cases.

Cons:

Limited Momentum Outside Asia: Alibaba Cloud has a large IaaS market share in Asia but lacks a presence in other regions. It has yet to become a strong option outside of Asia, except for organizations running business in China and Chinese multinationals expanding overseas.
Slowdown in China: Alibaba Cloud lost 4.5% of its IaaS market share in China in 2022, even though it still holds the top market share in the Chinese market. This slowdown was due to the fines and suspensions from Chinese regulators as well as increased competition.
Limited Solution Engineering: Alibaba Cloud has a rich set of functions, but the solution engineering that brings them together (i.e., concisely with prescriptive clarity) is not as strong as other leaders in this Magic Quadrant.

Amazon Web Services - Leader

Pros:

Integration With AWS and Its Ecosystems: AWS's container services integrate well with other AWS infrastructure and management services and a wide range of AWS partner offerings on AWS Marketplace. This brings the significant strengths in the core public cloud over to its container management offerings.
Customer Base: AWS's extensive customer list demonstrates that its two main container services, Amazon ECS and Amazon EKS, are highly trusted in production. From startups that value serverless simplicity to complex enterprises that value standards-based governance, a wide variety of customers are running their critical container applications on AWS.
Serverless Portfolio: AWS pioneered serverless container services, releasing AWS Fargate in November 2017. It has continued to expand serverless container options so users, from complex large enterprise organizations to single app development teams, can choose one that suits their requirements.

Cons:

Multicloud Support: AWS does not proactively add features or solutions for managing containers in multicloud environments. Its main multicloud option is to deploy Amazon EKS Distro on other public clouds. This alone is not enough compared to other vendors' multicloud capabilities, and EKS Distro is supported only by AWS partners.
Solution Navigation: AWS has a wide breadth of sometimes overlapping container management offerings. For example, enterprises struggle to differentiate between Amazon EKS and Amazon ECS.
Kubernetes Cluster Fleet Management: AWS publishes best practices for Kubernetes multicluster environments, but lacks native fleet-management tools for managing the life cycle and state of distributed clusters.

Canonical - Niche Player

Pros:

Frictionless Buying: Pricing is cost-competitive, with all relevant information visible on Canonical's website (including subscriptions, levels of support, training, design/architecture and remote management costs). This provides clarity and simplicity in budgeting and expense management.
Edge Computing: Canonical continues to invest in container management for edge use cases (including MicroK8s, which is a minimal Kubernetes distribution). This makes Canonical suited to test, development and edge use cases.
Flexible Deployment: Canonical's offerings are flexible and particularly suited to multicloud deployment due to Ubuntu's support across many cloud infrastructure providers. Likewise, it is supported on most leading hardware providers and, therefore, equally suited for private and/or hybrid deployment.

Cons:

Focus: Canonical has a wide variety of users within its installed base. However, it has not focused on the needs of traditional enterprises (e.g., requiring a range of infrastructure and application platform services), and its strategy reflects this.
Limited Application Mind Share: Canonical has less traction and distinguishing capabilities with enterprise developers than other vendors in this Magic Quadrant. Because enterprise developers are a primary influencer of container management buying decisions, this puts Canonical at a disadvantage.
Business Model: Public information shows that profitability has been a long-term challenge, even though Canonical's products are in widespread use. Its heavy focus on open-source principles has led to enterprise concerns about vendor viability.

Google - Leader

Pros:

Differentiated Portfolio: GCP has the highest number of differentiating features of all the vendors' products in this Magic Quadrant. Examples of advanced features include managed service mesh (Anthos Service Mesh), cross-cluster networking capabilities, and tools for managing policy and security across fleets of Kubernetes clusters (Anthos Config Management).
Influence Kubernetes Community: As the creator of Kubernetes and the top vendor by contribution toward Kubernetes, Google has an influential voice in the community and at the forefront in meeting enterprise Kubernetes requirements. Google recently strengthened this position in terms of application platforms by donating Istio and Knative to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).
Simplicity: Google tends to address requirements with fewer services, rather than adding new services, which helps keep its portfolio simple. This principle is also the basis for the simple user experience of Google's serverless container services, such as Google Cloud Run.

Cons:

Edge and On-Premises: GCP has container management products to cover edge and on-premises environments, but it has less adoption and business volume than other leaders in this Magic Quadrant.
Traditional Enterprise Systems: Gartner believes that GCP has a lower presence in traditional enterprise systems use cases such as data center migrations centered on lift and shift or the modernization of legacy applications, compared to cloud-native and modern application development use cases. These traditional systems are where there are many container-based modernization initiatives.
Managed Service Provider (MSP) Ecosystem: GCP lags behind in the MSP ecosystem capable of meeting complex enterprise requirements, when compared to other Leaders in this Magic Quadrant. This includes partners that are driving enterprise application modernization.

Huawei - Challenger

Pros:

Growth in China: Huawei Cloud is one of the fastest-growing IaaS providers in China. This has culminated in Huawei meeting more complex enterprise requirements. Huawei Cloud leverages its large market share to extend its presence from traditional IaaS-based services into public container services.
Contribution to Open Source: Huawei demonstrates its commitment to open source in this market by contributing to 68 CNCF projects, which is the second highest among the vendors in this Magic Quadrant. Among the open-source projects Huawei donated to CNCF are KubeEdge, Volcano and Karmada.
On-Premises and Edge: Huawei has a mature business for on-premises IT infrastructure and networking offerings that can cover edge use cases. Huawei Cloud leverages these other services to provide container management that can comprehensively cover on-premises, private/hybrid cloud and edge requirements.

Cons:

International Sanctions: International sanctions have a significant impact on Huawei's overall business activities, and organizations may impose strict conditions on sourcing from Huawei Cloud. For this reason, Huawei Cloud does not provide services in some regions, such as the United States.
Serverless Options: Huawei Cloud's serverless container services lack some capabilities offered by other cloud providers in this Magic Quadrant. Its roadmap includes a serverless managed Kubernetes service and a simpler serverless container service for application developers, but they are not yet released.
Transparency: Little information is available related to Huawei Cloud's international offerings. In addition, information about China-based and international services is often mixed and difficult to distinguish from one another.

Microsoft - Leader

Pros:

DevOps Platform: GitHub and Microsoft Azure DevOps have large mind share and market share as DevOps platforms. Microsoft's container services, which are tightly integrated with those offerings, provide an advantage over other vendors.
Hybrid Cloud: Microsoft offers container service options for hybrid cloud environments. These include AKS, which can be used on Azure Stack HCI, and Azure Arc, which allows users to manage Kubernetes clusters running outside of Azure using Azure Resource Manager.
Integration With Microsoft Azure: Microsoft container management services integrate well with Microsoft Azure and other services, such as Azure Monitor and Azure Security Center. This brings the significant strengths in the core public cloud over to its container management offerings.

Cons:

Resiliency: Gartner clients have reported frustrations with outages of Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), particularly in association with updates and maintenance events.
Heterogeneous Environments Support: Although Microsoft has an advanced vision of container management in multicloud heterogeneous environments, it still lacks some capabilities, such as full cluster management on other public clouds or VMware vSphere.
Certified Container Images: Microsoft has fewer certified container images for common programming languages and frameworks than other leaders in this Magic Quadrant.

Mirantis - Niche Player

Pros:

Enterprise Track Record: Mirantis has a track record of supporting enterprise IT infrastructure requirements spanning the last two decades. This provides I&O leaders with support and integration to existing environments (particularly OpenStack).
Developer Focus: Mirantis continues to invest in developer-centric tools (Lens, amazee.io and Shipa). This enables I&O teams to deliver capabilities including an integrated development environment (IDE), DevOps workflow and associated automation.
Edge Computing: Mirantis has developed k0s (a certified Kubernetes distribution deployed as a single binary supporting x86 and ARM processors). This serves the needs of telco and other edge environments.

Cons:

Positioning: Over the last three years, Mirantis has pivoted from its OpenStack heritage to Kubernetes through the Docker Enterprise acquisition. I&O leaders must ensure adequate support, focus and investment for its increasingly hybrid container management needs.
Core Functionality: Technical evaluation of Mirantis' solution shows it to be weak across several Gartner-defined use cases for container management. It lacks differentiators versus others in this evaluation.
Customer Traction: Mirantis has less market traction relative to other vendors in the evaluation. This creates concern about investment relative to its software and cloud-based container management offerings.

Oracle - Niche Player

Pros:

Private and Sovereign Cloud: Oracle offers more choice than other cloud providers when it comes to container services on private and sovereign clouds, especially for large enterprise organizations in regulated industries. Examples include OKE on Dedicated Region Cloud@Customer and Kubernetes Engine for Oracle Private Cloud Appliance.
Service-Level Agreement (SLA): Oracle provides an SLA of 99.99% for OKE clusters. This is higher than the typical SLA of 99.95% for most service providers in this Magic Quadrant, making it a good fit for use cases where cluster-level availability is critical.
Competitive Price/Performance: Oracle competes for large opportunities based on price/performance, winning big SaaS vendors and others. OCI's characteristics such as nonblocking networking help achieve better price/performance.

Cons:

Developer Experience: Oracle lacks key features for application platforms and developer experience, such as debugging tools, certified container images and application scaffolding. Additional tools and services need to be integrated to complement these features.
Investment Priority for Container Management: Oracle has been adding container-management features at a good pace, but slower than the Leaders in this Magic Quadrant.
Limited, Not Integrated, Fleet Management: Oracle's fleet manager, Verrazzano, is offered as a stand-alone software product and has its own user interface. This is less convenient and has less functionality than that of other cloud service providers. Its management capabilities for heterogeneous clusters are also limited.

Red Hat - Leader

Pros:

Market Understanding: Red Hat has developed the product functionality and external partnerships to span the variety of differing container management scenarios. This provides confidence to risk-averse mainstream enterprises looking to adopt container management.
Product Capabilities: Red Hat OpenShift is a strong competitor in the majority of enterprise container management use cases. For I&O leaders seeking a hybrid offering, its pedigree in software-based deployments now extends to distributed cloud and edge computing.
Strategic Focus: Red Hat has a decades-long history in supporting modern enterprise IT infrastructure (with Red Hat OpenStack Platform being an example that Red Hat is starting to incorporate). Its recent acquisitions contribute to the open-source community and also enhance the Red Hat OpenShift platform (e.g., CoreOS, Codenvy, Ansible and StackRox).

Cons:

Pricing: Many Gartner clients have stated that they consider Red Hat OpenShift to be relatively expensive (both container management software subscription and the managed cloud offerings). I&O leaders may struggle to justify the cost for deployments that do not require advanced functionality.
Product Dependencies: Several key features are available only in premium editions but are standard with other vendors (including Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes). Along with the requirement for a Linux distribution from Red Hat, I&O leaders may be concerned about the degree of lock-in.
Competitive Friction: Red Hat must continue to add application platform functionality to meet customer requirements, which creates tension when it competes with its cloud partners (and vice versa). I&O leaders will need to decide whether or not to prioritize their strategic cloud vendor's application platform.

SUSE - Challenger

Pros:

Heterogeneity: Rancher has a history of supporting multiple container management distributions. This allows SUSE customers to avoid lock-in for container workloads and support federated requirements (including autonomous business units).
Product Strategy: The 2020 acquisition of Rancher showcased SUSE's commitment to container management. This provided a foundation for its container-management offering that has expanded over the past few years.
Cost-Competitive: SUSE pricing competes well with the leaders in this evaluation and is often a reason for its selection.

Cons:

Stability: Recent organizational changes follow more than a decade of repeated acquisitions and divestitures of SUSE. This creates concern about longer-term strategy and focus, which is exacerbated by the departure of several of Rancher's most senior executives since late 2021.
Differentiation: SUSE was early to the market. Since then, many other vendors have entered the market with more diverse offerings that better cater to the enterprise application development community.
Product Integration: SUSE is expanding its offering where some of the newer components have not been well-integrated (e.g., NeuVector). This creates concern about fragmentation and a loosely integrated portfolio.

Tencent Cloud - Challenger

Pros:

Gaming and Consumer Industries: Tencent Cloud has a large market share in the gaming and consumer markets, making it a strong choice for organizations in those industries.
Scalability: Tencent Cloud has IaaS services optimized for high-performance networking and scale-out application architectures. This works as a strength for its container service portfolio and makes Tencent Cloud attractive to customers with high-scale workload requirements.
Application Platforms With Digital Ecosystems: Tencent Cloud's serverless container platform, TCB, is very popular in application development for Tencent Cloud's digital service ecosystems (e.g., games, social networking and digital e-commerce).

Cons:

Limited Enterprise Momentum Outside China: Tencent Cloud lacks a presence for enterprise customers outside China. It has yet to break out of niche markets for gaming, consumer industries, organizations running business in China, and Chinese multinationals expanding overseas.
Partner Ecosystems for Enterprises: Tencent Cloud's partner ecosystems for enterprise businesses outside of China is limited, compared with the Leaders in this Magic Quadrant, from consulting to managed service providers.
Smaller Market Share: Tencent Cloud continues to grow steadily, but still ranks third in terms of market share in China's IaaS market, lagging behind other China-based cloud service providers.

VMware - Leader

Pros:

Customer Base: VMware has a large installed base and an extensive ecosystem of partners and alliances. It has a successful track record of building on what it already provides, resulting in lesser need to develop new operational skills.
Product Strategy: Ongoing acquisition by VMware demonstrates its commitment to modern applications (e.g., Heptio, Pivotal, Bitnami, Saltstack and Octarine). These acquisitions, combined with ongoing internal R&D investments, highlight how it is adding capabilities to meet the needs of container-based environments.
Hybrid Operations: Leveraging its background in hybrid infrastructure and operational tooling, VMware offers strong capabilities in cluster fleet management across hybrid estates including life cyle management support for public cloud Kubernetes services such as Amazon EKS.

Cons:

Competitive Friction: VMware has built partnerships with leading cloud providers but container management is an area of competitive overlap. To stay broadly competitive in the cloud-native era, VMware must successfully add value that differentiates it from its cloud partner's native container services.
Product Integration and Roadmap: Tanzu comprises container management capabilities originating from multiple internal R&D projects and acquisitions. Gartner clients express confusion at the array of offerings, particularly those delivered as a service, and concern about if/how the different offerings are integrated.
Pending Acquisition: Broadcom's pending acquisition of VMware has been a topic of concern for numerous Gartner clients. Many VMware customers are worried about the potential for price increases, reduced investment in VMware products or impacts to support agreements.

FAQs

Q: Which vendors are Leaders in 2023?

A: Alibaba Cloud, Amazon Web Services, Google, Microsoft, Red Hat, VMware

Q: What does "Leader" mean in MQ terms?

A: Leaders distinguish themselves by offering a service suitable for strategic adoption and having an ambitious roadmap. They can serve a broad range of use cases, although they do not excel in all areas, may not necessarily be the best providers for a specific need and may not serve some use cases at all. Leaders in this market have appreciable market share and many referenceable customers.

Q: How do I interpret a Gartner Magic Quadrant?

A: https://www.gartner.com/en/research/methodologies/magic-quadrants-research

Report:

Top Vendor Products for Container Management in 2023

Container Management Vendor Product Comparisons 2023

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FAQs

Q: Which vendors are Leaders in 2023?

Q: What does "Leader" mean in MQ terms?

Q: How do I interpret a Gartner Magic Quadrant?

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