IDC Report Highlights Ant Group’s Leadership in China’s Cloud‑Native Market

IDC recently released the "China Cloud‑Native Market Analysis" report, focusing on the current state and development trends of the cloud‑native market and evaluating domestic cloud‑native vendors. According to IDC data, Ant Group has become one of the most comprehensive domestic cloud‑native technology providers.

As cloud computing enters a mature phase, cloud‑native is recognized as a key technology that maximizes cloud benefits and drives growth in the cloud industry and the broader digital economy. An increasing number of traditional enterprises are adopting cloud‑native technologies and development practices, and industry experts agree that the cloud‑native era is an inevitable stage of cloud computing evolution.

IDC’s research shows that among enterprises using cloud‑native, nearly 50% have applied the technology to core and secondary systems, and 83% of enterprises plan to continue increasing their investment in this area.

The cloud‑native ecosystem is still expanding, now covering the full lifecycle of cloud‑native solutions. IDC defines 14 technical domains for cloud‑native; Ant Group’s commercial cloud‑native product SOFAStack spans eight of these domains, including messaging and stream/batch processing, CI/CO, orchestration and scheduling, microservice framework, API gateway, service mesh, observability, and automation/configuration. Open‑source projects such as Kata Containers and Dragonfly also list Ant Group as a maintainer.

Since 2017, as Ant’s cluster scale grew and costs for the Double‑Eleven shopping festival rose, Ant made large‑scale investments in cloud‑native technologies, focusing on three areas: massive cluster scheduling, mixed‑deployment of clusters, and Service Mesh. After years of evolution, these technologies are now fully applied within Ant, dramatically improving machine resource utilization through scheduling and mixed‑deployment, and enhancing infrastructure upgrade efficiency via Service Mesh, positioning Ant at an international leading level.

Beyond internal use, Ant shares its cloud‑native achievements through open‑source and commercial channels. Open‑source contributions include the secure container project Kata Containers, the image acceleration project Nydus, the cloud‑native network proxy MOSN, and the cloud‑native runtime Layotto. Commercially, products like SOFAStack have been deployed in hundreds of financial institutions (e.g., Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, Nanjing Bank, Zhejiang Rural Credit, CITIC Bank, PICC Health), helping enterprises transition from monolithic to cloud‑native architectures while meeting security and compliance requirements, achieving high availability, evolvability, and agile innovation.

Looking ahead, Ant plans to further explore the integration of cloud‑native with trusted computing to build trustworthy native infrastructure, advance green low‑carbon computing, and continue open‑sourcing its results to promote industry‑wide green and innovative development.