What Liam Bollman-Dodd Said About Cloud Native, AI and Platform Engineering at KubeCon EU 2026

At KubeCon + CloudNativeCon EU 2026 in Amsterdam, theCUBE’s Rebecca Knight and Rob Strechay sat down with Liam Bollman-Dodd, Principal Market Research Consultant at SlashData, and Bob Killen, Senior Technical Program Manager at CNCF, to discuss the newly released State of Cloud Native report. The full interview is at the end of the article.

The conversation was framed around one of the report’s headline findings: the cloud native ecosystem now includes nearly 20 million developers, a sharp increase that raises a bigger question than simple growth alone can answer — who counts as a cloud native developer now, and what does that say about where the industry is heading?

That was where Liam Bollman-Dodd made some of the most important points in the discussion.

Cloud native growth is more than an adoption story

Rather than treating the growth figure as a straightforward adoption story, Liam explained that part of the jump comes from a broader and more accurate view of the developer population. In earlier waves of research, cloud native was largely associated with backend and infrastructure specialists. But as SlashData and CNCF expanded the lens to include developers working across cloud-based environments more broadly, the picture changed significantly. Many developers are now building on cloud native foundations without directly configuring the infrastructure themselves.

That distinction matters. Liam’s argument was that cloud native has moved beyond its original identity as a specialist infrastructure domain. Developers may not be managing Kubernetes clusters by hand, but they are still using observability stacks, cloud services, APIs, telemetry tools, and platform abstractions that place them firmly inside the cloud native ecosystem. In that sense, the report is capturing a structural change in software development, not just a bigger version of the same community.

How AI is connected to cloud native growth

He also connected that shift directly to AI. One of Liam’s most notable observations was that cloud native tooling is increasingly becoming the operational backbone for AI inference and machine learning workflows. His point was not that these tools were built specifically for AI, but that they are well-suited to the scale, networking, data movement, and orchestration demands that AI creates. As a result, teams pursuing AI are often becoming cloud native by necessity, even if that was not their original strategic goal.

Organisational structure

Another key theme Liam raised was the growing divide in how organisations structure development work. Some companies still want deeply empowered developers who understand the full toolchain and can work close to infrastructure. Others are moving in the opposite direction, using platform engineering and internal abstraction layers so developers can focus more narrowly on product and business problems. Liam’s view was that both models are valid responses to different organisational needs, but they produce very different relationships with cloud native technology. That, in turn, affects how adoption should be interpreted.

He also pointed to what may become one of the more consequential findings over time: the long tail of organisations that remain underrepresented in industry narratives. Liam noted that many capable developers operate in environments with low budgets, limited internal leadership, compliance constraints, or delayed access to newer tooling. In his telling, the cloud native market is not only being shaped by advanced platform teams and large-scale adopters, but also by organisations that are arriving later and more gradually. That makes the ecosystem broader, but also more uneven than headline numbers alone suggest.

By the close of the interview, Liam’s broader message was clear: the meaning of “cloud native developer” is evolving, and the community may expand even faster than the raw numbers suggest as more people begin to recognise that the tools and workflows they already use fall under that label. In that respect, the interview was less about celebrating a large number in and of itself, but about redefining the boundaries of a maturing ecosystem.

The full interview: