What the 2026 Stack Overflow Developer Survey tells us about where trust goes next
If you’ve followed Docker lately, you know we’re all-in on sandboxes. We’ve spent a ton of time talking about the difference between sandboxes and containers, and helping our customers and the industry as a whole understand when to use which. In fact, Docker president Mark Cavage dedicated his opening keynote at WeAreDevelopers World Congress North America to this exact topic, using live demos to show why sandboxes (and not containers) provide the level of isolation required to contain autonomous agents. To be clear: none of that means we suddenly think less of containers or the vital role they will continue to play in the software development process and ecosystem. We are Docker, after all. And lest anyone forget, as the just-released 2026 Stack Overflow Developer Survey confirmed yet again, when it comes to containers, there’s Docker, and there’s everyone else. Docker is the most used (59%) and most desired (38%) tool in the survey’s cloud development category. Now, we can all agree that the tech industry is inundated with surveys these days. Vendors, analysts, research firms, everyone’s got a groundbreaking new survey. So, if your reflex response to reading about new survey results is to roll your eyes and think here we go again , well, I get it. But the annual Stack Overflow Developer Survey isn’t just another survey. When it comes to the developer community, it’s arguably the survey, the one developers themselves pay attention to. Over the course of 16 years, it has become something of a de facto standard for those of us interested in truly understanding how developers think and act. Released earlier this month, the 2026 survey reached more than 30,000 respondents across 169 countries. Of course, this year’s survey did more than just remind us of Docker’s continued container dominance…
