CNCF and SlashData radar: Backstage, Helm and kro in "Adopt" for platform engineering

2026-03-24 · Publisher : CNCF · Domain : Cloud & DevOps

On 24 March 2026, the CNCF and SlashData publish the Q1 Technology Radar: 28% of organizations have a dedicated platform team, and Helm, Backstage and kro are placed in "Adopt" for application delivery.

### Background On 24 March 2026, at KubeCon Europe, the CNCF publishes with SlashData the **Q1 2026 Technology Radar**, devoted to platform engineering tools. It is based on responses from more than 400 professional developers, collected in Q4 2025. The radar ranks technologies by the maturity and usefulness perceived by the developers surveyed. ### Key facts - 28% of organizations report a dedicated platform engineering team; the most common model (41%) is multi-team collaboration around platform capabilities. - 35% use a hybrid platform to integrate AI workloads, combining existing developer platforms with specialized AI tooling. - Application delivery: Backstage, Helm and kro are placed in the "Adopt" position; Helm gets 94% of 4- or 5-star ratings for reliability. - Workflow automation: ArgoCD, Armada, Buildpacks, GitHub Actions and Jenkins in "Adopt"; 91% of developers would recommend GitHub Actions. - Security and compliance: cert-manager, Keycloak and Open Policy Agent in "Adopt"; Karmada gets the highest usefulness rating among workflow automation tools. ### Why it matters For an IT services firm building internal platforms, this radar serves as a tooling reference: it confirms a widely shared base (Helm, Backstage, Argo CD, cert-manager) and shows companies extending existing platforms for AI rather than building separate stacks. It remains a survey of more than 400 developers, published by the CNCF: it reflects practitioners' perception, not market share. ### Takeaway Platform teams converge on a base of CNCF projects, and AI is grafted onto it rather than creating a separate stack.

Tags : Plateforme engineering, Cloud natif, DevOps, Kubernetes, IA