Cloud-Native Foundations 2026 Trend Report
How teams run Kubernetes and platform engineering at scale, what slows software delivery down, where AI fits in operations, and how Bitso scaled delivery with coding agents. In partnership with DZone.
The Cloud-Native Foundations 2026 Trend Report surveys cloud-native practitioners on how they run Kubernetes across clouds and clusters, what slows down building and releasing software, and where cost and platform engineering fit in. That friction grows as coding agents raise the volume of changes: at Bitso, featured in the report, coding agents increased per-developer PR output by 60%. Signadot brings you the report in partnership with DZone.
What you’ll find in the report:
- How cloud-native environments are built: 69% of respondents run multi-cloud, hybrid or multi-cluster Kubernetes, and management practices vary widely, from no defined approach to standardized platforms with guardrails.
- What slows delivery down: tool sprawl (51%), environment drift and inconsistencies (45%), and slow build, test and deploy feedback loops (40%) rank above Kubernetes skills gaps (29%).
- Where cost comes from: data transfer and networking (46%), idle or underused workloads, especially non-prod (44%), and AI/ML compute (44%).
- Where AI fits in operations: AI-assisted autoscaling and performance optimization is the most used AI capability (49%), and 46% rank AI-driven operations and automation among their top investment priorities for the next 12 months.
- What platform engineering delivers: policy enforcement at scale, standardized deployment patterns, reliability and faster onboarding.
- How Bitso scaled delivery with coding agents: engineers and agents validate each change against production-like dependencies before a PR is opened. Open-to-deploy time fell 62% and the change failure rate 83%.
- Expert articles and a solutions directory: Kubernetes operations at scale, cloud complexity as an operating model problem, and building a cloud-native golden path.
Watch the Trend Talk: Verification Is the New Bottleneck, DZone’s panel on the report’s findings with Arjun Iyer (Signadot), Raghava Dittakavi (TraceLink) and Shamsher Khan (GlobalLogic).
Research data: DZone, 2026 Cloud-Native Foundations Trend Report.