News

Red Hat Chases 'Big 3' in Cloud-Native App Platform Report

• By David Ramel
• 08/08/2025

While the "Big 3" cloud giants unsurprisingly dominate Gartner's new Magic Quadrant for Cloud-Native Application Platforms, Red Hat is making strides, chasing the hyperscalers with its OpenShift platform.

As can be seen in the chart below, that platform propelled Red Hat into what might be considered fourth place (vendors aren't ranked that way) in the Magic Quadrant approach, which groups vendors into four quadrants: Leaders, Challengers, Visionaries and Niche Players, based on two axes, completeness of vision and ability to execute.

Context
The report states: "For software engineering leaders, the primary objective of using cloud-native application platforms is to streamline software development by leveraging the platforms’ capabilities and automation features." These platforms provide structured execution environments that conceal infrastructure complexities while offering additional capabilities such as serverless functions, container deployment on abstracted infrastructure, AI inference support, and integration with a wide range of services and tools. Gartner advises that organizations consider multiplatform strategies to balance front-end and back-end needs, but cautions that multiprovider approaches may be impractical for many.

Market Definition and Description
Gartner defines cloud-native application platforms as those that provide managed application runtime environments for applications and integrated capabilities to manage the life cycle of an application or application component in the cloud environment. According to the report, these platforms "enable distributed application deployments and support cloud-native operations -- such as elasticity, multitenancy and self-service -- without requiring the development team to provision infrastructure or manage containers." They are designed to facilitate deployment, runtime execution and management of modern applications while enhancing developer productivity, accelerating development cycles, and increasing operational effectiveness by scaling on demand.

The platforms offer a structured execution environment that hides the complexities of underlying infrastructure. They also provide vendor-supported versions of runtimes and frameworks for common languages such as Java, .NET, Node.js, PHP, Python, Go and Ruby, allowing product teams to deliver faster customer value.

Mandatory Features
Gartner lists several mandatory features for inclusion in this market category:

• Application runtime services for multiple workloads, including web, mobile back ends, microservices, AI/ML, and analytics, without custom container images or infrastructure setup.
• Automated deployment integrated with DevOps practices.
• Autoscaling with load balancing and support for multiple running instances.
• Monitoring and observability tools to track logs, metrics, events, and traces for meeting service objectives.
• Fully managed service model covering maintenance, monitoring, updates, support, security, backups, and performance tuning.

Common Features
Common features identified by Gartner include:

• Support for large-scale container deployment, management, and configuration.
• Built-in cost control tools for monitoring and optimizing spending.
• AI-assisted operations for smarter configuration, orchestration, and resource allocation.
• Integrated IDE plugins and development tools to speed application creation.
• Serverless options that auto-scale with demand and bill only for compute resources used.
• Automatic patching and updates to maintain security without downtime.
• Supports multiple languages and frameworks for flexible app development.
• Easy connections to databases, messaging systems, and caches via standard APIs.
• Resiliency features like failover, backups, and disaster recovery across regions.

Market Overview
Gartner reports that the cloud-native application platform market generated more than $3.5 billion in revenue in 2024, growing at 16.4% year over year. It is projected to exceed $7 billion by 2029, representing a five-year compound annual growth rate of 15.1% in constant currency. The platforms are described as integrating "multiple advanced technologies that enhance the deployment, scalability, security, connectivity and observability of applications and AI agents" while simplifying management of containers, Kubernetes and virtual machines.

The appeal lies in the ability to streamline development and deployment within a single platform, which improves operational efficiency and supports AI-driven features for better developer productivity. Use cases include high-volume transactional applications, API-first microservices, decoupled web UI/UX, cloud migration, and the development of AI agents and applications.

While Gartner usually provides research to only paid clients, its Magic Quadrant reports are often made available for free by the vendors themselves in licensed-for-distribution editions, which can be found with a quick web search.