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."
