Cloud native adoption hits 15.6m developers globally

New research reveals that 15.6 million developers worldwide are now utilising cloud native technologies, with backend and DevOps professionals driving the majority of adoption.

The findings, drawn from a major survey conducted by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and analyst firm SlashData, provide a detailed outlook on the evolving practices and infrastructure strategies of developers globally.

The survey reveals that 77 per cent of backend developers now use at least one cloud native technology. Backend and DevOps professionals together account for 58 per cent of all users, illustrating the depth of integration these approaches have achieved within enterprise environments. Technologies such as API gateways and microservices remain prevalent, with adoption rates of 50 per cent and 46 per cent among backend developers, respectively.

Some newer practices, such as observability, Kubernetes, chaos engineering, and immutable infrastructure, continue to spread at a more gradual pace. These are viewed as indicative of a maturing sector that is moving from early adoption to comprehensive operation of infrastructure and development processes.

"The data confirms what we're seeing in the ecosystem: cloud native is expanding far beyond traditional backend and container infrastructure use cases. From platform engineering to AI, developers are incorporating cloud native technologies to meet reliability, scalability and operational needs," said Chris Aniszczyk, CTO, CNCF.

The report identifies a marked shift in cloud infrastructure strategies. Hybrid cloud usage has increased to 32 per cent among all developers, up from 22 per cent in 2021. Multi-cloud deployment has also gained ground, now at 26 per cent, allowing organisations to achieve greater flexibility and reduce dependency on single providers. The emerging trend of distributed cloud, which is used by 15 per cent of backend developers, reflects growing needs to run workloads closer to data sources and end users.

"DevOps itself has kind of been like a pendulum. In years prior, you usually had a DevOps person that might be embedded with a team, or someone that's more infrastructure focused with the team," said Bob Killen, CNCF's Senior Technical Program Manager. "Now, because we have IDPs and some of these other things, that is splitting to the back. We see more of a operations platform, engineering focused team with developers who are consuming more of the cloud native tool, [and] they still consider themselves back end developers."

Artificial intelligence and machine learning developers exhibit a different pattern of cloud native adoption. Only 41 per cent of professional AI developers are considered cloud native, despite their reliance on robust infrastructure. About 30 per cent of AI developers use Machine Learning as a Service (MLaaS) platforms, which simplify operations by abstracting infrastructure management.

"A lot of [AI developers] are consuming SAS, so they're talking to like a chat GPT endpoint or something like that - but those services are all running on cloud native infrastructure, so the vast majority of sort of [machine learning] SAS services out there are running Kubernetes under the hood," said Killen. "So it's just that they're using it, they're consuming it, they just don't necessarily realise it. So they don't really know what's behind the curtain."

The CNCF concludes that the cloud native ecosystem is entering a phase focused on automation, observability, and resilience in development. Moving from adopting tools to optimising systems.