Help Shape the 2026 State of Kubernetes Networking Report
Share how your team uses CNIs, ingress, service mesh, load balancing, network policy, and observability. Your input will help build the next community-driven report on Kubernetes networking trends.
Kubernetes networking often relies on a complex combination of tools - CNI, proxies, ingress, load balancers, service meshes, and so on - and it can feel like there are endless combinations. Last year, we ran the first comprehensive State of Kubernetes Networking survey to begin to understand what some of the common patterns were: which tools were often used together, which networking and security features were commonly adopted, and which gaps teams struggled to solve.
After the survey closed, we crunched through the data, tried to make sense of it all, and made a number of observations. You can find a write up of the inaugural State of Kubernetes Networking report and the full 25-page copy here. A few of the insights are below:
The feedback on last year's report was fantastic, and it was all down to your answers. We read through every one of them before writing up our findings. The report is only ever as good as the survey behind it: the more people take part, the better the 2026 report will be. That is where you come in.
Why another report?
It was always our intention to run it year on year. Not only because it gives us trends (we suspect it will show, for example, that Gateway API is being adopted at fast speed) but also because the way people use Kubernetes is evolving quickly. More and more teams are running virtual machines on Kubernetes - or at least that is what we think (the survey will help us validate some of these assumptions). The same goes for AI workloads: this time, we will try to get a better understanding of the kind of AI workloads you are running. Are you doing model training and fine-tuning? Agentic apps? MCP servers? We also want a sense of the networking and security challenges that come with running them.
Kubernetes continues to evolve at pace, and so will its networking. That is exactly why we want to keep taking its pulse every year. The report helps us, and hopefully the wider community, make sense of how things are evolving.
Help shape the report and win a prize
The survey takes a few minutes, and every response makes the 2026 report sharper. As a thank you for taking part, there will be prizes to win, such as CNCF certification vouchers and signed copies of books.
We will run the survey until mid September and publish the results ahead of KubeCon North America once more.
Thanks again for participating!
Help Shape the 2026 State of Kubernetes Networking Report
Share how your team uses CNIs, ingress, service mesh, load balancing, network policy, and observability. Your input will help build the next community-driven report on Kubernetes networking trends.
Nico Vibert, Principal Technical Marketing Engineer
Nico Vibert is a Principal Technical Marketing Engineer at Isovalent, the company behind the open-source cloud-native solution Cilium. Prior to joining Isovalent, Nico worked in many different roles - operations and support, design and architecture, and technical pre-sales - at companies such as HashiCorp, VMware, and Cisco. In his current role, Nico focuses primarily on creating content to make networking a more approachable field and regularly speaks at events like KubeCon and Cisco Live. Nico has held over 15 networking certifications, including the Cisco Certified Internetwork Expert CCIE (# 22990). Nico is the co-author of the "Cilium: Up and Running" O'Reilly book and is the Lead Subject Matter Expert on the Cilium Certified Associate (CCA) certification.