Red Hat Named a Leader in 2024 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Cloud Application Platforms

This week we announced that Red Hat has been positioned as a Leader in the first ever 2024 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Cloud Application Platforms. We are proud of this recognition, as we believe this is a great validation of Red Hat OpenShift cloud services’ ability to help organizations bring cloud-native applications to market faster with the infrastructure that best meets their unique needs. The Red Hat OpenShift cloud services portfolio consists of jointly engineered solutions with hyperscalers, including Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS, Azure Red Hat OpenShift, Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Cloud and Red Hat OpenShift Dedicated on Google Cloud.

This report follows the Gartner recognition of Red Hat as a Leader in the recent 2024 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Container Management. Red Hat believes that these recognitions combined showcases how Red Hat OpenShift not only provides users with a comprehensive application platform to accelerate application development and deployment, but with availability in both fully managed or self-managed options, Red Hat OpenShift runs wherever and however customers need.

To help further explain the evaluation of the Gartner Magic Quadrant from our point of view, we’re answering some of the most frequently asked questions.

Source: Gartner, “Magic Quadrant for Cloud Application Platforms,” By Tigran Egiazarov, Mukul Saha, Anne Thomas, Steve Schwent, 4 November 2024

What is the Gartner Magic Quadrant?

“Magic Quadrant reports are a culmination of rigorous, fact-based research in specific markets, providing a wide-angle view of the relative positions of the providers in markets where growth is high and provider differentiation is distinct. Providers are positioned into four quadrants: Leaders, Challengers, Visionaries and Niche Players. The research enables you to get the most from market analysis in alignment with your unique business and technology needs.”

How was the evaluation done in this Magic Quadrant? What was the criteria for inclusion?

“Gartner defines cloud 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. They typically enable distributed application deployments and support cloud style operations — such as elasticity, multitenancy and self-service — without requiring infrastructure provisioning or container management. 

Cloud application platforms are designed to facilitate the deployment, runtime execution, and  management of modern cloud-native or cloud-optimized applications (e.g., web-based apps, back-end  services with/without APIs, etc.) without the need to manage any underlying compute infrastructure. Also, they are designed to enhance developer productivity, accelerate development and deployment cycles, and increase operational effectiveness by making it easier to scale on demand. 

Cloud application platforms offer a structured execution environment for applications, effectively hiding  the complexities of the underlying infrastructure and computing resources. They also provide vendor supported versions of application runtimes and frameworks for the commonly used languages (for  example, Java, Node.js, PHP, Python, Go and Ruby). By abstracting the complexities associated with  infrastructure management, cloud application platforms enable product teams to deliver faster customer value. 

The cloud application platforms market reflects the consolidation of technologies across deployment,  scalability, security and observability of applications to streamline software delivery. They are intended  to be more than just a platform for running applications; they are essential for businesses aiming to achieve excellence in software engineering, productivity and market responsiveness.” 

“The mandatory features for this market include:

• Application runtime services (including language runtime support) for multiple application types  including web applications, mobile backends, microservices, AI/ML models, and analytics  applications without requiring infrastructure provisioning or container management. 
• Automated deployment of cloud-native applications (e.g., integration with DevOps). 
• Autoscaling (load balancing, scalability and running of multiple instances). 
• Application monitoring and observability — support for monitoring and observability to improve  service-level objectives, gathering production telemetry (logs, metrics, events, traces). 
• Cloud-based managed service — vendor (service provider) handles the maintenance,  monitoring, updates and troubleshooting of the cloud application platform. This includes  support, security, backups and performance optimization. It allows users to only focus on the  application that can be deployed on cloud application platforms.” 

Why is this significant to us?

According to Gartner, Leaders execute well against their current vision and are well positioned for tomorrow. We believe Gartner is one of the most recognized technology analyst firms in the IT space and having been recognized as a Leader validates not only the current capabilities of Red Hat OpenShift, but also Red Hat’s vision for evolving the solution to best meet the needs of our customers in the future.

Learn more about Red Hat OpenShift as a Cloud Application Platform

A full copy of the Gartner Magic Quadrant on Cloud Application Platforms can be downloaded here.

Gartner disclaimer:
Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Container Management, By Dennis Smith, Tony Iams, Wataru Katsurashima, Michael Warrilow, Richard Watson, 10 September 2024

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This graphic was published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research document and should be evaluated in the context of the entire document. The Gartner document is available upon request from Red Hat.