Amazon Web Services (AWS), Alibaba, and Microsoft were all judged to have industry leading function-as-a-service (FaaS) platforms in Forrester Research’s latest ranking of popular offerings.

The Forrester Wave report had AWS’ Lambda and Alibaba’s Function Compute platforms neck-and-neck at the top of the “leaders” category. AWS’ Lambda was cited for having the market’s broadest depth of options and reach in terms of actual usage, which is helped by the Amazon platform being one of the first FaaS products to hit the market. Alibaba was touted as having recently embraced the container and open source ecosystem with support for projects like OpenTracing, OpenTelemetry, Grafana monitoring, and Jaeger tracing.

Microsoft’s Azure Functions also resided in the report’s top category, though it fell short of the market leaders. The platform was lauded for recent user experience updates and deeper Azure integrations, but demerited for a pricing structure that required users to pay extra for often-used extras.

The report’s “strong performers” category housed four entries in Google’s Cloud Functions, Nimbella, Tencent’s Serverless Cloud Functions, and IBM’s Cloud Functions. While lacking the total breadth of those ranked higher, Forrester Research noted that Tencent provides a good option for customers looking to deploy FaaS applications in China, while the other three were noted for tapping into projects like Knative (Google) and OpenWhisk (IBM and Nimbella) that allow for some degree of application portability across platforms.

Oracle was the only vendor that landed in the report’s “contenders” category, where its relatively new Cloud Functions platform was noted for its focus on security, containers, and event-driven integration. Huawei’s also new FunctionGraph was ranked as the only “challenger” in the report, with its focus best targeted at areas where the vendor has a cloud presence.

In terms of actual platform usage, a recent Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) member survey found that AWS’ Lambda was far-and-away the most used “hosted platform” with nearly 60% of respondents stating their use of the platform. Google’s Cloud Functions was a distant No. 2 with around 25% of respondents stating their use of the platform, followed by Microsoft’s Azure Functions at just over 20%.