Amazon Web Services (AWS) has been recognized as a Leader in The Forrester Wave: Serverless Development Platforms, Q2 2025, achieving the highest ranking in both the Current Offering and Strategy categories.
The Forrester Wave evaluation provides business leaders with rigorous, fact-based analysis for technology purchasing decisions. Through transparent criteria spanning current offering, strategy, and customer feedback, Forrester evaluates vendors to identify Leaders, Strong Performers, and Contenders. The AWS serverless portfolio unifies traditional and AI-driven development, enabling teams to build intelligent, adaptive systems with minimal infrastructure and code overhead. The evaluation analyzed across key services, including AWS Lambda for serverless compute, AWS Step Functions and Amazon EventBridge for application integration, and AWS Fargate with Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) for serverless containers.
Serverless beyond function-as-a-service
The serverless operating model has evolved beyond function-as-a-service approaches. It has become a comprehensive cloud-based software development model that abstracts away underlying cloud infrastructure, complex server configurations, runtime characteristics, and deployment patterns from the development process. Forrester defines key characteristics of serverless development platforms as supporting the deployment of arbitrary business logic, decoupled state from the underlying compute, autonomous scale by demand (often back to zero), flexible consumption-based billing, abstraction of the underlying cloud infrastructure, and event-driven communication.
According to the Forrester report, “AWS provides a mature foundation for event-driven application development with extensive integrations across the AWS ecosystem. AWS continues to evolve its serverless portfolio for market demands including the growing influence of AI workloads. AWS’s platform completeness and integration depth are notable, making it well-suited for organizations seeking to build production-grade event-driven applications at scale with granularity and control.”
AWS capabilities recognized in the report
AWS’s recognition as a Leader in this report underscores, for us, our commitment to providing best-in-class innovation and developer experiences in serverless application development. Findings from AWS’s vendor profile in the report include:
- Strategy – AWS has a clear and cohesive vision that aligns serverless capabilities across its expansive cloud portfolio. Its innovation strategy is tightly coupled with customer feedback and reinforced through sustained R&D investment.
- Capabilities – AWS offers strong capabilities across developer experiences, tools, and service integrations. Developers benefit from mature software development kits (SDKs), command line interface (CLI) tools, and infrastructure as code (IaC) options. Its APIs and event-driven integrations are among the best, enabling complex, scalable architectures and workflows.
Evolving serverless developer experience on AWS
AWS has made significant investments to streamline the developer onboarding experience through comprehensive resources and tools. As generative AI infuses every step of software development and transforms the technology landscape, organizations must adapt quickly to maintain their competitive edge. Many are building distributed architectures that use specific large language models (LLMs) based on unique requirements, and the serverless operating model is ideal for these AI-powered applications. Serverless enables organizations to start small and scale seamlessly while handling distributed, event-driven workflows securely at scale.
The newly launched AWS Serverless Model Context Protocol (MCP) server provides AI-powered, contextual guidance throughout the serverless development lifecycle, so developers can receive real-time assistance with service selection, best practices, and implementation patterns while building applications with Lambda. The developer-first approach also includes the Amazon Q Developer plugin for AI-assisted development (including code generation, debugging, and architectural guidance), enhanced AWS SAM CLI capabilities for improved local testing and debugging, the integration with Serverless Land for direct blueprint access on the Lambda console, extensive documentation with practical examples, interactive tutorials, and integration with familiar development environments. AWS has also enhanced the getting started experience through simplified deployment workflows, IaC templates, and automated best practices enforcement. Furthermore, the broad ecosystem of AWS partners, developer advocates, and community contributors provides additional support through workshops, sample applications, and reference architectures. These comprehensive improvements demonstrate our commitment to accelerating serverless adoption by making development more intuitive, efficient, and accessible for teams at any stage of their cloud journey.
Conclusion
AWS has been recognized as a Leader in the Forrester Wave: Serverless Development Platforms, Q2 2025, receiving top scores in Current Offering and Strategy categories, which, in our opinion, underscores our commitment to innovation and excellence in serverless computing. As the serverless landscape continues to evolve, AWS remains at the forefront, providing a comprehensive suite of services that enable developers to build scalable, efficient, and intelligent applications.As we look to the future, AWS will continue to invest in serverless technologies, pushing the boundaries of what’s possible in cloud computing. Whether you’re building AI-powered applications, modernizing legacy systems, or creating entirely new digital experiences, AWS serverless offerings provide the agility, scalability, and innovation you need to stay ahead in a rapidly evolving digital landscape.
Read the full report to learn why Forrester positioned AWS as a Leader in the Forrester Wave: Serverless Development Platforms, Q2 2025.
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