CNCF Annual Cloud Native Survey 2025: Kubernetes Is Becoming the Default AI Runtime – But “AI Platform Readiness” Is the Real Differentiator

CNCF Annual Cloud Native Survey 2025: Kubernetes Is Becoming the Default AI Runtime – But “AI Platform Readiness” Is the Real Differentiator The thesis is already happening: AI workloads are converging on Kubernetes AI maturity isn’t blocked by models — it’s blocked by delivery and operations The biggest blocker to AI adoption is governance-by-human (and culture absorbs the cost) Why Kubernetes-native policy becomes central in the AI era Why “we’ll build it ourselves” is a trap AI will reward platforms that make governance invisible and change safe A familiar pattern is playing out again. A decade ago, the big shift wasn’t “containers” themselves—it was everything that had to solidify around them: repeatable delivery, production operations, observability, and guardrails that made change safe, i. e. making everything container-native. Many of us at Nirmata lived that transition firsthand. We’ve worked alongside enterprise platform teams through the container → Kubernetes shift, and we’ve stayed deeply engaged in Kubernetes safety in the open—through Kyverno and participation in community efforts like the Policy Working Group—because “production-ready” isn’t a feature; it’s a discipline. Generative AI is now hitting the same inflection point. And The CNCF Annual Cloud Native Survey: The Infrastructure of AI’s Future makes one thing unusually clear: AI is landing on Kubernetes. If you’re still debating whether Kubernetes will matter for AI infrastructure, the market has largely moved on. The CNCF survey reports that 66% of organizations are already using Kubernetes to host generative AI workloads. That’s not a “future” statistic—that’s current reality. More important is what sits behind that number.