HPE Developer Community teammate, Pramod Sareddy, and I just returned from KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2019. During my long journey back home to France, I decided to write about what I learned at the event while the breath-taking view of the San Diego bay was still fresh in my mind.

It had been a busy week for the HPE Developer Community team as we greeted dozens of event attendees and updated them on what’s new from Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE). The event offered a great opportunity to exchange thoughts and information with developers, front-end application designers, enterprise solution architects, and chief technology officers who were interested in containers and hybrid cloud solutions. The HPE Developer Community team also got to meet the HPE designers and architects of the newly announced HPE Container Platform.

At the conference, HPE presented and demoed the newly announced HPE Container Platform, as well as a true hybrid cloud CI/CD pipeline enabled by the HPE Container Platform, HPE Nimble storage, and HPE Cloud Volumes. Multiple in-booth theater sessions focused on these topics. Attendees crowded around the HPE booth to interact with HPE experts and get a chance to look at these new innovations.

Also in the booth, Pramod and I presented the benefits of joining the HPE Developer Community. Many attendees were interested in how the community can help developers, designers, and DevOps and ITOps engineers accelerate innovation and speed up their development time. They were also eager to sign up for our HPE Developer community newsletter, which earned them a chance to win one of our daily prizes.

We also showed off a pretty cool face recognition application Pramod wrote in Grommet, which runs on containers in a Kubernetes cluster, hosted on an HPE EdgeLine system. Another attraction in our booth was our HPE DEV-developed Hack Shack Attack gaming competition where players try to tame the IT monster. The game proved very popular among the developer community, as it earned participants extra chances to win a prize. We selected winners through a raffle at the end of each day.

The highlight of the event for us was witnessing the convergence of HPE innovations, resulting in the newly announced HPE Container Platform. The technology combines the BlueData container-based control plane with the KubeDirector open source project, along with the MapR data fabric for container persistent data storage and integrates Kubernetes, the de facto open source standard for container orchestration. This announcement piqued everyone’s attention, as evidenced by a continuous stream of event attendees stopping by to learn more about the announcement.

In short, the HPE Container Platform (a hardware agnostic, enterprise-grade container management software product) extends the benefits of running cloud-native enterprise applications with CI/CD micro services architecture on containers to non-cloud-native applications with persistent storage. Distributed, stateful applications, such as AI, ML, and big data applications, as well as enterprise traditional legacy workloads (which are generally not cloud-native and require persistent storage), can now run at scale on containers without the need to re-architect them. The HPE Container Platform delivers a seamless, cloud-like experience whether on-premises, at the edge, in multiple public clouds, or in a hybrid model. This makes the HPE Container Platform ideal for helping application developers, DevOps/ITops/CloudOps engineers, and data scientists accelerate their application development and deployment on containers, on-demand through a self-service portal and a RESTful API that surfaces programmable access.

The HPE Container Platform is now available for preview on any customers’ infrastructure of choice (bare metal and VM) and any of the major public clouds. To learn more about this unique HPE container software platform visit the HPE DEV portal and check out our blog article here!

For more opportunities to contribute your insights, knowledge and experience to building the best possible developer experience around containers and open source Kubernetes, as well as learn from your peers, join the conversation on our HPE DEV Slack Channel and join the community. Stay up to date with the latest news from HPE DEV by signing up for our monthly newsletter and we will send you more awesome developer-focused posts about HPE projects and platforms every month. You can also follow our community on Twitter.

We look forward to seeing you again at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon EMEA 2020, in Amsterdam, from March 30 to April 2, 2020.