CNCF Report: Global Cloud Native Developer Community Nears 20 Million
A report published this week by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) estimates there are now nearly 20 million cloud native application developers, representing 39% of the worldwide developer community.
Revealed at the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe conference, the estimate of the total size of the cloud-native application developer community is based on an analysis of GitHub/Stack Overflow account activity and employment statistics from the U.S. and European Union (EU).
Since the last time CNCF published a similar report six months ago, the estimate of the size of the cloud-native application development community has increased from 15.6 to 19.9 million developers, a 28% increase. Among backend developers, 52% are now classified as cloud native, up from 49% six months ago, the report projects. The total number of backend developers, however, declined from 58% six months ago.
At the same time, the proportion of developers working without formalized DevOps or platform practices has also declined to 12%, down from 20% six months ago. Those specifically working on developer experience teams have increased from 38% to 42%, and unified DevOps systems have grown from 36% to 41%. A full 88% of backend developers now work with at least one form of infrastructure standardization, an 8% gain from six months ago.
The report also estimates that 7.3 million developers building artificial intelligence (AI) applications are also relying on cloud-native technologies.
However, SlashData also published the results of a global survey of 12,021 developers that finds only 40% are working with containers, while another 27% have experience building software for a Kubernetes cluster.
Well over half (55%) said they are part of a DevOps team, with 53% working with backend services. A full 71% of backend developers use at least one cloud native technology but only 52% have experience with three cloud-native technologies. Specific technologies they have worked with in the past 12 months include application programming interface (API) gateways (47%), microservices (39%) and Kubernetes (27%). While 39% use microservices, only 6–7% have adopted advanced practices such as chaos engineering or immutable infrastructure.
Just over a third (34%) are now working across a hybrid cloud environment, compared to a third that are working on public cloud infrastructure, the survey finds.
Bob Killen, a senior technical program manager for the CNCF, said the increased number of cloud-native developers reflects adoption of internal developer platforms (IDPs) that provide a level of abstraction that makes it simpler for developers to build applications without having to directly interact with underlying IT infrastructure such as Kubernetes clusters. As such, there are more developers actually working with cloud-native technologies than they may realize, he added.
Liam Bollmann-Dodd, principal market research consultant at SlashData, added developers have historically tended to shy away from complex platforms that require them to know too much about infrastructure. As it becomes simpler to rely on higher levels of abstractions to build and deploy cloud-native applications, the overall number of developers willing to now build software that is destined to run on a Kubernetes cluster increases.
Additionally, the number of cloud-native applications being built has also been steadily increasing as organizations continue to rely more on containers to build software.
Estimating the size of any application developers ecosystem is always going to be an inexact science. The one thing that is certain is the number of developers using these technologies to build and deploy applications continues to increase.
