News

Cloud Giants Fend Off Red Hat in Container Management Research Report

• By David Ramel
• 08/11/2025

The latest Magic Quadrant report on container management from Gartner Research shows the "big three" hyperscalers holding off Red Hat in the Leaders quadrant, where it trails Google, Microsoft and Amazon Web Services on both the ability to execute and completeness of vision axes.

This comes just after the exact same scenario played out in another new research report from Gartner on cloud-native application platforms (see "Red Hat Chases 'Big 3' in Cloud-Native App Platform Report").

In fact, both reports also see Alibaba joining the Leaders crowd, as can be seen in the respective charts.

Context
Gartner defines container management as offerings that support the deployment and operation of containerized workloads, using a combination of technologies -- many open source -- to enable agile application deployments and infrastructure modernization. Delivery methods include stand-alone software or as a service.

According to Gartner, these solutions automate the provisioning, operation and life cycle management of containers at scale, with centralized governance and security policies for container workloads and associated resources. They support modern application requirements, including platform engineering, cloud management and CI/CD pipelines, with benefits such as improved agility, elasticity and access to innovation.

Market Definition and Features
Mandatory capabilities listed by Gartner include orchestration and scheduling, container runtime, service discovery and registration, artifact registry, routing and networking, management UI, API access, and serverless container options. Common features range from large-scale container deployment and integrated IDE tools to built-in cost control, AI-assisted operations, automatic patching, and disaster recovery across regions.

Market Overview
Gartner reports that the container management market grew more than 20 percent year over year to reach over $2.5 billion in 2024, and is expected to exceed $4.5 billion by 2028, representing a compound annual growth rate of 17.6 percent. The technology is increasingly being leveraged for AI/ML workloads due to its scalability, as well as for hybrid and multicloud deployments.

While Kubernetes underpins most solutions, Gartner notes that proprietary vendor additions often limit portability, reinforcing lock-in. Vendors are responding to operational complexity and security concerns with more serverless offerings that simplify adoption.

Leaders and Challengers
In the Leaders quadrant, Google, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, and Red Hat are joined by Alibaba Cloud, SUSE, and Huawei. The Challengers quadrant includes Broadcom (VMware), Nutanix, Tencent Cloud, Mirantis, Canonical, Oracle, and Spectro Cloud. Kubermatic appears as the sole Niche Player in this year's evaluation.

Gartner describes Leaders as vendors that offer services suitable for strategic adoption with broad use case coverage and appreciable market share, while Challengers are positioned well for certain needs but may lack a broad scope or the pace of market adaptation.

Vendor Highlights
Among the Leaders, Google was noted for its streamlined portfolio and advanced AI workload features, including 65,000-node clusters and GPU support in serverless containers. Microsoft was cited for tight DevOps/DevSecOps integration via GitHub and Azure DevOps, as well as investments in AI-driven workload management. AWS earned recognition for its broad integration with other AWS services, strong partner ecosystem, and growing serverless portfolio.

Red Hat's OpenShift platform was described as a strong competitor across enterprise use cases, particularly in hybrid environments, though Gartner noted cost concerns among clients. Alibaba Cloud was praised for broad functionality coverage and market leadership in China, while SUSE's strengths include cost-competitiveness and support for multiple Kubernetes distributions. Huawei was recognized for its open-source contributions and feature development speed.

Challenges and Trends
Gartner highlighted persistent obstacles for late adopters, including operational complexity, security concerns, and the need for DevOps skills to ensure deployment success. The firm also pointed to an industry trend toward integrating container management with AI/ML workflows, hybrid/multicloud control planes, and marketplaces offering third-party container tools 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.