SALT LAKE CITY -- The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and SlashData released the Q3 2026 CNCF Technology Radar report at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2026. The research examines developer perceptions of observability, infrastructure as code (IaC) and storage technologies, and finds that how organizations structure platform engineering is closely tied to how they approach AI infrastructure.
Platform Ownership Shapes AI Strategy #
According to the report, 54% of developers at organizations where individual teams manage their own tooling use hybrid approaches for AI workflows, compared with 43% where multiple teams collaboratively provide platform capabilities and just 5% at organizations building custom internal developer platforms. Among those building custom platforms, 38% use a separate, dedicated AI platform and 33% extend their existing developer platform. At organizations where platform teams curate third-party tools, 25% rely primarily on AI vendor platforms.
“Centralized teams tend to make deliberate decisions about extending existing platforms or building dedicated AI environments, while distributed teams are more likely to adopt hybrid approaches,” said Liam Bollmann-Dodd, principal market research consultant at SlashData.
Prometheus, OpenTelemetry and OpenTofu Earn Adopt Positions #
Prometheus and OpenTelemetry earned “Adopt” positions in observability. Eighty percent of developers rated Prometheus four or five stars for maturity, and 92% of current and former OpenTelemetry users said they were likely to recommend it. Fluent Bit was the most recommended observability tool at 99%. In IaC, OpenTofu and OpenFeature earned Adopt positions, with 96% of OpenTofu users likely to recommend it, while Crossplane, Atlantis and cdk8s landed in “Trial.” Carina earned the Adopt position in storage, and Rook and Longhorn also received strong recommendations.