Overview
Modern application teams are under pressure to deliver faster while managing growing architectural complexity, security risk, and tooling sprawl. theCUBE Research’s Day 0 Build, Test Survey Research Report examines how organizations prepare applications before they ever reach production, analyzing cloud-native readiness, CI/CD maturity, API management practices, developer tooling, GitOps adoption, and AI integration based on a global survey of 375 IT, development, operations, and platform engineering professionals.
The findings show that cloud-native adoption is now mainstream, with containers and Kubernetes widely deployed, but operational maturity is uneven. Gaps in automation, testing frequency, API lifecycle management, and rollback capabilities continue to slow delivery and increase risk. At the same time, AI-powered observability and security tooling are emerging as foundational capabilities, helping teams reduce mean time to resolution, improve developer productivity, and manage exploding telemetry volumes. The report highlights where organizations are succeeding, where friction persists, and which investments will matter most as cloud-native becomes the default model for enterprise software delivery.
Key Takeaways
- Cloud-native is the new normal: most organizations now run the majority of applications in containers and rely on managed Kubernetes platforms to reduce operational burden.
- Automation remains inconsistent: while CI/CD pipelines are common, daily testing and automated rollback are still the exception, increasing deployment risk.
- API and developer tooling are bottlenecks: manual version management and fragmented toolchains continue to slow release cycles and introduce governance challenges.
- AI is becoming foundational: AI-driven observability and security scanning are rapidly being adopted and now rank among the top enterprise technology investment priorities.
