Current trends in cloud native technologies, platform engineering, and AI

F5 NGINX has emerged as the default front door of choice for AI infrastructure, with leading AI hardware and software providers adopting it as their primary or recommended reverse proxy and delivery controller for AI applications. Survey findings revealed strong momentum among NGINX users—and the broader application delivery community— toward embracing an AI-driven future.

AI agent use: When asked about engagement with agentic AI tasks (see Figure 1), respondents indicated that “Configuring NGINX” had the highest current adoption at 25%, followed closely by “network traffic optimization and load balancing” at 24%. “Infrastructure deployment and scaling”—along with “security vulnerability remediation”—are currently being used by 23% of respondents.

Combined engagement: When combining responses from respondents currently using and experimenting with agentic AI, “log analysis and proactive troubleshooting” leads at 48%. “Configuring NGINX” and “infrastructure deployment and scaling” tied at 46% each, while “network traffic optimization” follows at 45%.

Strongest future interest: “Drift detection and correction” generated the strongest future interest at 33%, followed by “monitoring NGINX deployments” at 32% and “incident alerting and triage” at 31%.

The cloud native revolution continues to gain momentum well over a decade after it kicked off with containers and Kubernetes. For key elements of cloud native, even if adoption is nearly universal, full penetration remains distant (see Figure 3).

Over the past decade, many technology organizations have moved to adopt APIs as a core connection mechanism for both internal and external operations. In cloud-native architectures, API-first is a core design principle. Correspondingly, 86% of respondents deploy API gateways to manage their API infrastructures (see Figure 4).

Despite this widespread shift to APIs and the strong presence of API gateways, the majority of organizations still have immature API security practices (see Figure 5). While 86% of organizations use APIs, only 34% have implemented API security. This is a massive exposure in modern application infrastructure.

Less than half of respondents are focused on API traffic analysis (43%) and observability (38%), two other core elements of API security. This gap likely indicates challenges in observing and managing APIs writ large. In fact, 23% of respondents use different API management approaches across teams, a fragmentation that likely stems from difficulties getting the entire organization on the classic “golden path” for API management.

Platform engineering as a buzz word has crossed over into the mainstream. In fact, 65% of respondents have begun implementing platform engineering capabilities and responsibilities (see Figure 6). This result spans large organizations with dedicated platform teams down to single team members serving as platform engineering leads. Approximately 27% have small, dedicated platform engineering teams, and 21% of organizations have individual platform engineering role within development/operation teams. Another 13% of organizations have large, dedicated platform engineering teams. So, clearly, the platform engineering value proposition has spread and taken hold.