China Has 1.75 Million Cloud Native Developers, CNCF Report Finds

Sep 8, 2026
A CNCF and SlashData report estimates that China has 1.75 million cloud native developers, including about 400,000 working on AI.

Cloud Native Computing Foundation and SlashData estimate that China has about 1.75 million cloud native developers, including roughly 400,000 working on AI, according to a report they released in a press statement. The findings come from a China focused analysis of a survey of 12,500 developers across 100 countries.

Nearly half of backend developers in China now qualify as cloud native, compared with 30% two years ago. The share rises to 58% among backend developers under age 25. Cloud native adoption among professional industrial internet of things developers in China is 48%, compared with 42% globally.

The report says 88% of backend developers use some form of infrastructure standardization, up from 80% six months earlier. It identifies Kubernetes, microservices, streaming, observability, service meshes and multicluster management among the technologies used as AI teams move from experimentation and data pipelines to production serving and distributed inference.

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