News

AWS Is Strongest Public Cloud Platform, Research Report Says

• By David Ramel
• 03/10/2025

Amazon Web Services (AWS) was deemed to be the strongest public cloud platform in a new research report.

In the Forrester Wave report for Q4 2024, AWS leads the "strength of offering" axis in the Leaders grouping, which is also charted by a "strength of strategy" axis. Fellow leaders are familiar: Microsoft, Google Cloud and Alibaba Cloud.

"AWS's superior vision has long been summarized by two slogans: 'Work backward from the customer,' and then 'go build it' through an array of core services called primitives," says the report.

Furthermore, Forrester said, while the genAI revolution is testing AWS's strategy in the face of rivals who provide ready-to-go abstracted managed services, AWS is responding by updating its 'go build it' mantra to include an open approach to AI models and a focus on operationalizing AI capabilities in its services.

AWS offers a bevy of AI services, including:

• Amazon SageMaker: A fully managed platform that enables developers and data scientists to build, train, and deploy machine learning models at scale. SageMaker supports various frameworks and tools, providing flexibility for different ML workflows.
• Amazon Bedrock: A fully managed service that provides access to foundation models from leading AI companies through a single API, enabling the development and scaling of generative AI applications.
• Amazon Q: An AI-powered virtual assistant designed to help businesses with tasks such as troubleshooting cloud applications, summarizing documents, and facilitating group chats.
• Amazon Rekognition: A service that adds image and video analysis to applications, capable of detecting objects, scenes, and faces, as well as identifying inappropriate content.
• Amazon Lex: A service for building conversational interfaces into applications using voice and text, powering chatbots and virtual assistants.
• Amazon Polly: A text-to-speech service that converts text into lifelike speech, enabling the creation of applications that talk.

In describing the cloudscape overall, Forrester noted how AI innovation along with platform power are transforming cloud computing.

"The public cloud platforms (PCPs) of the mid-2020s are a world away from just 'somebody else's computer' that data center diehards used to mock," Forrester said. "Hyperscale computing power now constitutes a distinctly new era characterized by widespread, and soon to be pervasive, intelligence and AI. That doesn't mean the end of on-premises IT, however. There's still plenty of lift-and-shift from on-premises IT to public cloud, and a lot more to come. However, today's top cloud providers accommodate customer demand for hybrid and multicloud environments, with a new-look intelligent edge for AI inferencing."

Cloud providers have traditionally attracted customers by delivering scalable efficiency and innovation, Forrester indicated. Now, they are expanding beyond enterprise IT, integrating AI-driven services across business functions, including business intelligence and low-code/no-code solutions. However, cloud AI isn't always the ideal choice due to factors like cost, latency, and data sovereignty. Ultimately, whether to adopt cloud-based AI is a crucial strategic decision for organizations.

As for AWS's AI, the report said: "AWS's genAI capabilities initially lagged behind the rollout of rival services, but its Bedrock managed AI service and support for an array of Foundation Models keep it competitive. AWS's Q genAI assistant powers Q Developer for AI-assisted code development and Q Business, an assistant for internal enterprise use. AWS is still playing catch-up on some genAI capabilities around development; however, the company maintains its advantage on much of the core cloud infrastructure, with custom Trainium and Inferentia chips for AI as well as pricier setups for NVIDIA GPUs and lower-cost chipsets, including AWS's own ARM offering."

Forrester noted that AWS declined to participate in the full Forrester Wave evaluation process. "For vendors that are not full participants, Forrester uses primary and secondary research in its analysis," the company said. That research might include public information and data gathered from briefings, along with independently sourced customer interviews. "We may ask the vendor for an abbreviated briefing and/or to provide reference customers. We may also rely on estimates to score vendors."

Note that fellow cloud giant Microsoft trumpeted its inclusion as a leader in the report in a March 10 blog post, apparently participating in the full Forrester Wave evaluation process. It also emphasized the AI angle: "We believe the recognition is a testament to the dedication of countless engineers, developers, and partners who have worked relentlessly to evolve Azure into the platform it is today -- one that is trusted by enterprises to drive innovation, scale with confidence, and meet the challenges of an AI-driven world."