The big three cloud providers tend to snap up the majority of hosting honours for containerised workflows. Google, AWS, and Microsoft are the de facto hosting providers, as you might expect, with Red Hat, Alibaba, and SUSE comprising the other household names in the microservices space.
But the latest Gartner Magic Quadrant for Container Management 2025 positions Huawei in the Leaders quadrant for the first time. Huawei Cloud is a company that’s quietly making inroads into enterprise mindsets all over the world, and innovating – especially with AI-related workloads – despite the best efforts of the current US government to stymie global competition in the space.
Huawei Cloud scored the highest global customer recognition score (4.7) of the companies in Gartner’s paper, beating fellow Chinese behemoths Tencent and Alibaba, plus the ‘big three’ of AWS, Google GCP and Microsoft Azure.
According to Gartner, Huawei Cloud offers the most complete container product matrix in the cloud industry, where its platforms can be found in public, distributed, and hybrid clouds, and edge environments.
The company’s big wins in terms of clients and users get little coverage in the US and Europe, but it’s proving an effective provider for companies like media service Starzplay (which streamed the 2024 Cricket World Cup across the Middle East and Central Asia) and logistics giant Ninja Van in Singapore.
South America and Africa, too, have been the scene of several successes for the Chinese company, notably Nigeria’s e-commerce platform Konga, which uses a cloud native architecture based on Huawei Cloud’s CCT Turbo, and major power utility Chilquina Energia in Chile. The latter organisation speaks of a 90% average performance improvement across its stack.
The Linux Foundation’s CNCF (cloud-native computing foundation) steers an open and interoperable approach to all elements of cloud computing, and Huawei is the only Chinese cloud provider with a vice-chair position on the organisation’s Technical Oversight Committee. The company also maintains more than 20 project maintainer seats at the CNCF. It’s also an active donor to projects under the CNCF’s oversight, including KubeEdge, Karmada, and Kuasar.
Huawei’s offerings include container products like CCE Turbo, CCE Autopilot, the distributed cloud-native service UCS, and its Cloud Container Instance (CCI). CCE AI clusters form the infrastructure for CloudMatrix384 supernodes, which deliver 300 petaflops of processing grunt and outperform the Nvidia NVL72.
Despite being regarded with some suspicion by large enterprises in the West – it’s Chinese origins creating an automatic xenophobic distrust – Huawei continues to innovate in the AI and microservices spaces despite, or perhaps because of, continued economic, trade, and rhetorical pressure applied by the current US administration.
AI market watchers will be aware of Huawei’s Pangu models that come pre-configured with directed learning corpora for specific industries, including utilities, media, engineering, and telecoms.
Huawei Cloud is available in 34 geographical regions, with 101 AZs (availability zones). Huawei’s AI Cloud Services provide AI compute for over 1,300 customers, the company says, including well-known brands around the world, public sector organisations, and academic institutions.
The commitment by Huawei, Huawei Cloud and other Chinese providers such as DeepMind to the development of models in the open are at odds with the approach of Western companies, where proprietary technology and advances are closely-guarded secrets.
Huawei Cloud’s leadership of open-source projects KubeEdge and Volcano show a commitment to a broad range of open-source projects that widen the company’s ability and scope in AI and containers, something that’s reflected by Gartner’s findings.
The company’s ability to provide supporting technologies related and adjacent to container management, (AI silicon, security, etc.) helped position the company in the Leaders section of the latest Gartner paper.
The full Gartner Peer Insights Magic Quadrant for Container Management 2025 is available to read here.
(Image based on “Clouds” by CSLmedia Productions and is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.)
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