Today’s developers are AI-pilled. Cloud native developers even more so. That’s the key takeaway from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s (CNCF) latest report on cloud-native developers, released on Tuesday during KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America in Salt Lake City.
The data is clear: As of the third quarter, there were 21.2 million cloud-native developers, or 41% of the total developer population.
And while half of non-cloud-native developers use AI to help code, a full three-quarters of their cloud-native peers use AI to ship code today. (Just under two-thirds of all developers using AI to write code use the technology as a central, or core, part of their workflow, according to the dataset.)
Why are cloud native developers so comfortable using AI? According to the CNCF’s executive director Jonathan Bryce, “they’re looking for an edge, they’re looking for an opportunity to work on the latest things and really push the envelope in their career and in their technology use.”
Ahead of the report’s release, Bryce sat down with The New Stack to chat all things CNCF and developer trends. And we left the conversation with good news: Alongside a growing developer pool — “more folks are making their way into development roles,” in part-time and full-time fashion, Bryce told TNS — the collection of production-ready tools for the cloud-native developer is rapidly expanding.
“More folks are making their way into development roles”
Like many open-source software foundations, the CNCF has a tiered approach to adopting, maturing, and releasing new tools. First, there’s the ‘sandbox,’ where projects “develop the kind of rigorous processes that make an open source project trustworthy and predictable and something that you might integrate into a real system,” according to Bryce.
Next is the incubation stage, followed by graduation. Of some 250 projects under the CNCF, only a handful reach full graduation.
See also: The CNCF is graduating projects faster than ever. AI agents are helping with the due diligence.
But their ranks may swell in the coming years. New in the sandbox at CNCF? KubeRay, Agent Substrate, OpenShell, OpenRL, and others. New to incubation? Meshery, K8GB, and others. And KubeVirt, Karmada, and KubeFlow are graduating.
Lost amidst the sea of project names? Better do your research. “[W]herever you are in the industry, whatever type of organization you are right now, you need to understand open source technologies because that’s going to give your company leverage options,” Bryce argues.
And as we saw from the data we started today with, the number of developers hungry to put the new to work is only getting larger.
Our chat covers the Q3 2026 State of Cloud Native Development report, new and graduating projects, the Kubernetes AI Conformance program, and more. Sit back, hit play, and let’s have some fun!
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