Why Are Fewer Developers Actively Using Kubernetes? Insights from Slashdata Report

A Slashdata report released on May 18, based on a Q3 2021 survey of more than 19,300 developers, shows the number of cloud‑native developers is growing, yet the proportion of developers who consciously use Kubernetes appears to have slipped slightly.

According to Slashdata, “cloud native” encompasses any scalable, automated workloads running on public or hybrid clouds, exemplified by containers, service meshes, micro‑services, immutable infrastructure, and declarative APIs.

The study focused on developers using some form of container‑orchestration solution or server‑less platform, treating automated container usage as cloud native.

Many developers run containers on managed services such as Google Cloud Run or AWS Lambda; these are considered cloud native even though they hide the underlying Kubernetes runtime from the user.

The report indicates container‑based developers grew from 9 million to 10.4 million year‑over‑year, while cloud‑native developers rose from 6.1 million to 7.1 million. However, only 4.8 million respondents actively use an orchestration tool or management platform.

Compared with average programmers, cloud‑native developers are more likely to work in multi‑cloud environments, which can attract attention from employers.

Approximately 43 % of respondents still use on‑premises servers; 52 % use public cloud, 41 % private cloud, and 22 % multi‑cloud (percentages exceed 100 % because developers can select multiple options).

North American providers dominate the market: AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud together hold the largest share. Among orchestration tools, Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) accounts for 24 %, Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) 21 %, Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) 19 %, and Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) 18 %.

Self‑hosted or self‑managed orchestration solutions are rising, from 27 % to 30 % of respondents, as developers seek full control and customisation.

Although 90 % of developers know Kubernetes, the proportion who deliberately use it has shown a slight year‑over‑year decline, suggesting Kubernetes may become an invisible layer beneath higher‑level services.