Cloud-Native Developer Count Soars to 15.6 Million
A new report from the CNCF and SlashData reveals a major industry milestone: there are now 15.6 million cloud-native developers globally.
This Q3 2025 "State of Cloud Native Development" study shows this group now makes up nearly a third (32%) of all developers worldwide. This explosive growth is driven by the mainstream adoption of projects like Kubernetes, OpenTelemetry, and others. The project we depend on the most, bootc, is a CNCF Sandbox project.
This represents remarkable growth from the Q1 2025 survey, which reported 9.2 million cloud-native developers—a 70% increase in just seven months.
This huge number of developers is why we chose bootc, and it's reassuring to know that our development model is continuing to grow so quickly. The explosive growth from 9.2 million developers in April to 15.6 million in November demonstrates the rapid mainstream adoption of cloud-native technologies.