KubeCon + CloudNativeCon EU 2026 | Bob Killen CNCF & Liam Bollman-Dodd, SlashData

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Bob Killen

Senior Technical Program Manager

CNCF

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Primary Market Research Consultant

SlashData

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Bob Killen CNCF & Liam Bollman-Dodd, SlashData

Bob Killen

Senior Technical Program Manager CNCF

Liam Bollman-Dodd

Primary Market Research Consultant SlashData

In this interview from KubeCon + CloudNativeCon EU 2026, Bob Killen, senior technical program manager at the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), joins Liam Bollman-Dodd, principal market research consultant at SlashData, to talk with theCUBE Research's Rob Strechay and Rebecca Knight about how the cloud-native ecosystem has quietly grown to nearly 20 million developers — and why most of them have never touched Kubernetes directly. Killen unpacks findings from the latest State of Cloud Native report, explaining how the roughly 30% growth reflects not new... Read more

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What is driving the reported increase to nearly 20 million cloud‑native developers (about a 30% rise)? add

Is the rise of platform engineering and growing organizational maturity changing how teams interact and what developers are responsible for — i.e., do data show a “DevOps divide” between organizations that keep developers deeply involved in tooling and those that abstract infrastructure so developers can focus on product? add

How are organizations successfully integrating AI into their workflows and infrastructure? add

Which data point or trend is currently being underreacted to, or which insight from this research do you think will be most significant three to four years from now? add

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Bob Killen CNCF & Liam Bollman-Dodd, SlashData

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Rebecca Knight

>> Hello everyone and welcome back to Amsterdam where we are here at KubeCon and CloudNativeCon 2026. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight and we're theCUBE and I'm with Rob Strechay. Rob, this has been a really fun. This is not your first rodeo as we've established-

Rob Strechay

>> No.

Rebecca Knight

>> but this has been such a fun day already.

Rob Strechay

>> Yes. It's been a fun day. And I think what's been amazing is that there's such a breadth of technology and different personas that are here with their view on the technology and where it's going. And that's a lot of fun.

Rebecca Knight

>> Indeed. Indeed. Well, who better to talk about that than Liam Bollman-Dodd. Principal market research consultant at SlashData. Welcome, Liam.

Liam Bollman-Dodd

>> Thank you for having me.

Rebecca Knight

>> And Bob Killen, senior technical program manager at CNCF. Welcome to both of you.

Bob Killen

>> Thank you.

Rebecca Knight

>> So I want to start with you, Bob, because your latest state of the cloud native report just landed. And it was also on the main stage, so you got top billing today here at the keynote. One number really jumped out immediately, and that was the nearly 20 million cloud native developers, which is up roughly 30%. What's driving that? Let's start from the very beginning. What's driving that in your mind?

Bob Killen

>> I think it's because cloud native technology's become so much more both accessible and abstracted away. We have a lot more people that are consuming the technology indirectly. It's the same when we see the container usage actually go down. But it's not that it's actually really going down, it's just that people aren't interacting with it directly. So we're now seeing a much larger audience than we ever did before.

Rob Strechay

>> I look at it and go, part of this whole thing is that AI has really been driving a lot of the discussion. I think Jonathan did a great job of laying out what he did in Atlanta where he said, "Hey..." Kind of seeing it going from bots to inference or models to inference and now to agents. I think that they're all going to play a role. What is it that you're seeing? Because he had some interesting stuff he was talking about with the data. What are you seeing from that perspective?

Liam Bollman-Dodd

>> I think one of the things that he mentioned about the fact that the cloud native technologies are kind of like the pipelines. They're just the tools that you have to use to do AI inference, do ML pipelines. You just end up incidentally having to use a lot of cloud native stuff. Not only because you're dumping it all to the cloud most of the time because you need to compute and the power, but because they're just designed to allow this happen. It wasn't like they were built for this solely. They were built to handle all of the networking and all the data and all the modeling and the communications were all designed around normal problems. You stick in AI problems. These things happen to just be really good solutions because they were designed to be moved to these sort of problems. And now it's almost like you don't have to choose to be cloud native, it's just almost a requirement to do these things. Which I think is really changing how we think about what cloud native means as a new community and as a developer space.

Rebecca Knight

>> But are these new workers, are these people who've just picked up AI skills? Is this an entirely different kind of developer that we're talking about here?

Liam Bollman-Dodd

>> I think the first thing is that between six months ago, we're looking at the same kind of people, so we're not just seeing a growth in adoption. Before that, we saw our old number used to be around seven million cloud native development and it jumped to 15. And that jump was basically, we looked at our data and we talked to CNCF and we're like, "We don't think backend people are the only people we should be asking about cloud native technologies. We really should be asking anyone who does anything on cloud should be asked." And we did this and suddenly boom, we have like 15 million developers. There's a lot of people doing cloud native who were not in backend services and are in backend APIs who don't actually configure clouds themselves, but they're suddenly using all these tools. That was a big thing. Like you said, the shift with Kubernetes dropping, but the community expanding was... Because we changed how we look at the audience overall.

Bob Killen

>> It's like that larger community all consume themselves cloud native developers, even though they're not interacting with the classic cloud native tools like Kubernetes directly.

Rob Strechay

>> They're not just traditional backend kind of infrastructure.

Bob Killen

>> Yes. Exactly.

Rob Strechay

>> I look at it and I think the rise of platform engineering and finally, I think we're starting to see organizations adopt that model more so. Is that coming out, and what you're seeing in some of the data as well that organizationally we're maturing and that's why the interaction is different in that way?

Bob Killen

>> Absolutely. There was kind of a shift for a bit with the whole idea of DevOps, where you would bring the team together. But now with the amount of complexity and things like that, the team is coming away from the dev again and sort of being their own focused team with the goal of making the developer experience dramatically easier. I've heard that anecdotally from talking to a lot of people, and it just so happens that a lot of the data that he was seeing back that up.

Liam Bollman-Dodd

>> Yeah. Because one of the things that I hypothesized about a few months ago when the data started to put it out, is that we're basically seeing a DevOps divide. There are organizations that want, "I want my developer to be the most empowered developer ever. They know every tool, they know every configuration, they can do it all." They have a team of basically the crack developers. And the other people are being like, "I want my developers to solve problems that are business problems. I want them to be able to focus on services and product development and not have to think about how it's configured or how it's delivered or how it's serviced." You basically get this divide of those who abstract everything away and those who abstract very, very little away. And from my perspective, neither is wrong. They are solving two different problems. I think we're also seeing that divide in how we then see this interaction with all these cloud native technologies. And people are like, "Oh, I vaguely know I use this," or, "I know we have an observability tool because I get the readout, but I don't actually know what it is." But they are cloud nature developers now because they're involved in the ecosystem and they're involved in the technologies.

Bob Killen

>> A lot of them will be using open telemetry and not even realize it because they're viewing the telemetry and the dashboard somewhere.

Rob Strechay

>> Right.

Rebecca Knight

>> So based on that, Liam, seeing this organizational divide in terms of how the enterprise is thinking about its workforce and how it wants to solve problems today and the problems of the future, how do you see data that will come in, in a year, six months from now, in terms of what the skills that these organizations are looking for?

Liam Bollman-Dodd

>> Yes. I think one of the things we did in the tech radar is basically ask about, how are you approaching AI workflows? I think that is a very strong signal to what kind of skills we're expecting people, like, are you just putting your AI workflows in your normal workflows? That requires a different skillset to those who have branched out a fully separate workflow and those are mixing like, "We put some in production and we have a separate set." I think what we're going to see is at first level our analysis is like, what does the landscape as a developer look like? What are you interacting with and your service? Then once we kind of get a sense of that, we'll then be like, "Okay, so what does that look like as a task related? What are your tasks in this area?" Then from that we can hopefully then build our next round of like we update our survey every six months, build next round, try to understand what's going on. Because we have to be both ahead of the curve, so we're catching these things... We survey now, we don't get data for six weeks. But also behind it, as in we have to be based on our evidence to shift it around. So we're watching this AI workflow as a really key area to understand the differentiation that's happening in the developer workflow space.

Rob Strechay

>> I was going to ask that. Because I think one of the big questions I've had is that, I was at GTC last week and great Vera Rubin's out and NL72, which is 12 racks of compute and stuff. There's 12 of them going out a month. That's it. Worldwide. Not everybody's buying one, because it's hundreds of millions of dollars or something like that. But what people are doing is trying to figure out how do they use their existing and bring in AI into that existing. Maybe they have GPUs. AI has been around for a bit and maybe they're not... Again, they're not Vera Rubin, but they're not latest from AMD or Intel, but they're still pretty good. What are you seeing about organizations successfully integrating AI into their workflows and into their infrastructure?

Bob Killen

>> So I hate to use a , but it's very mixed. There's a lot of people all over the place. I'd say the one thing that has been more consistent out of the ones that are a little bit further along, is that they're going with a bit more of a hybrid approach. They'll do a lot of testing and things like that in a separate cluster or a separate team. And then they've already built out this large production infrastructure and then they'll shift the workload once it's sort of proven itself into the production infrastructure.

Liam Bollman-Dodd

>> Yeah. I think one of the things that we basically were wondering is that, are people going to build out their entirely owned separate AI workflow? I think what was interesting is that the people with the most competent to do that, so those who have strong internal development teams to build out platforms, they're the ones choosing not to do this. I think to me that signals that there is a philosophical approach to being a platform engineer, that you do not want to keep building separate systems, you want to all put it in together. So those that have the capabilities internally are putting everything together and they have the ability to do so. And everyone who doesn't have that much effort or resources in their internal platform teams are basically trusting that what they built so far is good and having the separate thing along the side, and hope that the two can coexist together peacefully.

Rob Strechay

>> Yeah. Again, the islands of automation. I remember talking about that 20 years ago when we were going down this path with separate networks for each application no less. And I feel like everything that's old is new again with that. And I'm glad to hear that platform engineering people at least are pushing back on that at this point.

Rebecca Knight

>> This kind of research, these reports, really shape how vendors and enterprises and investors think about what's happening and how the ecosystem is evolving, where they're going to place their bets, where they're going to put their resources. I'm curious to hear from both of you, what data point do you think is being underreacted to at this point in time in terms of... Or what you think could be the most significant insight three or four years from now from this?

Liam Bollman-Dodd

>> From my inside, there's a thing I repeat a lot, and I think one of the things we brought when we talk about the tech radar, is that vendors don't interact with low skill, low capital developers and low capital organizations at nearly the rate they think they do. These are competent developers that are skilled, but they work in organizations with no resources or no tech leadership team. Or where cloud is a compliant issue, so they have to deal with 17 lawyers before they can go to cloud. And these teams are coming along. I've spoken to many of them at this conference, they're picking up Kubernetes, they're picking up technology, but they are maybe a decade behind what people think existing. And I think this long tail of more and more people coming in, means that for someone, observability will be a new feature that they have in their stack come 2026. We have to be prepared to understand that there's people at full both scales of it. And I generally think vendors don't, because they're not interesting, they're not big capital people. But you have to make sure these people are included, otherwise you just leave them behind and they're never brought into the community at all.

Rob Strechay

>> Yeah. I think when you look at it, I think in the report it talked about things like Helm and Backstage and Crowe becoming adopt technologies. When I think about that, and again, from a platform engineering perspective, there's a lot of things you need to knit together. I think it's, to your point, some of the vendors have to think, "How do I make this easier versus..." And that's where their value add becomes, is the easy point. But also tying back to this, this new personality is a generalist, not a specialist in many shape. How did the data term out with that, with this platform engineering move to be more generalist?

Liam Bollman-Dodd

>> Well, I think the part to consider is that with our understanding of SlashData of platform engineering, we ask mostly about what people have at their org. We obviously do survey platform engineers and they're a component of the thing, but the broadest data is asking people what they do. What we found, I think the really important thing, is that in just maybe 18 months to two years, we've seen the people saying, "I have no DevOps standardization or no platform at the org." Go from being a decent plurality to... That's now 12% of people. So that is a shift of shifts, that even the people who want, they don't have a platform, they don't have a platform team, they maybe don't even have DevOps team, but their company understands, "We have to start standardizing processes, we have to start standardizing toolboxes." I think that was a huge thing when CNCF talking about just making it available to people. This is part of what this comes down to.

Bob Killen

>> I know even smaller orgs are basically developing internal developer experience teams to essentially try and reach out to their internal teams and teach them to get them to consume these things and reduce the barrier of entry into these. It also just makes it easier to consume the compliant tools that the platform engineering team has built.

Rebecca Knight

>> So both of you, to close us out here, the cloud native ecosystem has grown from a pretty niche conversation, one that we've been having on theCUBE for a long time, but in the general technology industry, to something that now nearly 20 million developers are a part of, where does it go from here?

Bob Killen

>> The fact that it still continues to grow, always amazes me. I think there'll be even more people that will grow to consider themselves a cloud native developer, a cloud native consumer, just because so many of these tools are getting integrated into various workflows. And even though, again, they don't even necessarily realize that they're using all these things, but they know it's there in the stack. So because they're consuming it that way, they still consider themselves part of the community. And in general, we've done a pretty good job of welcoming them into here and there's been a place for people like, it doesn't matter what you're using, there's a talk or a group here that you can interact with.

Liam Bollman-Dodd

>> For me, the cloud native definition that we use in our reports, that we define them as cloud native. They don't say they're cloud native. We define them as that. I think we're going to see a shift of more and more people who take on that label themselves, or the label kind of becomes an accepted thing. So the community itself, I think will grow a lot faster than the raw number will grow. As more and more people see, as Bob said, they see these tools are cloud native and they'll just like, "Well, I guess I'm a cloud native developer." And they will become involved and then you get participation, maintenance, contributions, and the community as a whole gets richer and deeper as a result.

Rebecca Knight

>> And more collaborative too.

Liam Bollman-Dodd

>> And more collaborative.

Bob Killen

>> Absolutely. Yeah.

Rebecca Knight

>> Absolutely. Well, this is great. Liam and Bob, a pleasure having you on a really interesting and fun conversation.

Bob Killen

>> Well, thank you for having us.

Liam Bollman-Dodd

>> Thank you for having me.

Rob Strechay

>> Thank you.

Rebecca Knight

>> I'm Rebecca Knight. Stay tuned for more of theCUBE's live coverage of KubeCon EU, CloudNativeCon EU. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in enterprise tech news and analysis.