Here’s your opportunity to learn more about today’s most popular technologies and connect with some of the industry’s leading technical specialists. Held monthly by the HPE DEV community, the Munch & Learn technology talks are free, 60-minute sessions where subject matter experts (SMEs) offer valuable insights and take your questions. Each month we will present a different topic, ranging from using containers to develop code to how to deploy data fabrics in AI and machine learning applications. We’ll cover a variety of technologies, including open source, Kubernetes, and HPE Ezmeral software. To view each month’s topic and catch replays of previous sessions, check out our Munch & Learn calendar.

At each monthly gathering, a technology expert is introduced by an industry luminary to the online audience. These are live sessions where you can bring questions and participate in the discussion. In keeping with the HPE DEV community’s fun and engaging atmosphere, during each session we share recipes and pictures of our favorite munchies on the #munch-and-learn channel of our Slack workspace. Attendees are able to not only get a better taste of new technologies, but also benefit by being able to try out some new recipes.

Harkening back to our very first sessions

For our first session, held on January 27, 2021, Ellen Friedman, principal technologist at HPE, hosted Ted Dunning, HPE Ezmeral Data Fabric CTO, to discuss the value of data fabric and how it can run, manage, control, and secure the apps, data, and IT that run your business – from edge to cloud. Starting at a very high-level, but quickly getting into details, they explored three examples of how data fabric has been used in production at scale. Details included how these and similar systems are constructed using data fabric primitives. Ted also touched on some of the details of how the HPE Ezmeral Data Fabric works. And we had the Slack channel open for folks to pose their questions. For details on this session, read Exploring Data Fabric and Containers in HPE DEVs new Munch & Learn monthly gatherings. You can also catch a replay of the session here.

During our February meeting, Nigel Poulton, Kubernetes technology author, introduced Tom Phelan, HPE Fellow and Ezmeral Software Platform CTO at HPE. They shared their thoughts on container architectures and how to leverage the Kubernetes Container Orchestrator to deploy and manage stateful, as well as microservice-based, applications. Nigel was kind enough to donate several eBooks to reward five attendees for posing excellent questions and sharing pictures of their favorite munchy. You can view the replay of this session here.

On March 24, 2021, Ellen Friedman hosted Doug Cackett, who led us all in a whiteboard discussion about how data is transformed to create meaningful business value. He covered why data science was important, automating decisions, how it works in the real world using some simple examples, and some of the reasons why a data scientist might want to finesse some of the data. You can catch the replay of this session and also review the side chat conversations.

Things start heating up

Daniel Feldman of HPE and Frederick Kautz of Sharecare joined us on April 21st for a discussion on how to build a foundation for zero trust using SPIFFE, the secure production identity framework for everyone. As was pointed out, enterprise applications and other software services are increasingly running across multiple platforms spanning diverse data centers and public clouds, all in various domains. To truly secure them, many are turning to a Zero Trust model where nothing is taken for granted and every request is verified. Because Service identity and authentication is perhaps the most fundamental piece of building a Zero Trust environment, it’s important to get it right so as to not undermine later efforts to enable Zero Trust in one’s organization. Catch the replay here.

On May 19th, Doug Cackett, an expert on the HPE Ezmeral Container Platform, returned to talk with us more about Data Science 101. Ellen Friedman joined as well as the session moderator, adding in interesting insights on different operational models used in the industry. If you missed the session, be sure to listen to the replay here.

We were really excited to have Owen Garrett of Deepfence.io join us on June 30th to discuss the fundamentals of production microservices. This session was one of our most highly attended sessions so far, and understandably so. Owen ran us through a very interesting presentation on why microservices are important for architecting and deploying modern applications; pointing out their unique characteristics, what opportunities they offer, and the challenges they introduce. He provided a high-level introduction to some of the technologies encountered when deploying a microservices application (i.e. Containers, Kuberetes, CI/CD), and then proceeded to get into a bit more detail on Ingress Controllers and Service Meshes as they pertain to microservices apps. He finished off by discussing some of the technologies you might want to keep in mind to secure your microservices application. Listen to the replay of this fascinating session here.

For the July 28th Munch & Learn session, Ellen Friedman and Ted Dunning once again joined us to explore more about how to make data consumable for real world data science. With as much data being gathered today, businesses are eager to make the most of it, but it can be challenging when you work with diverse and mismatched data sets and teams. Ted shared some interesting issues he's come across as well as how those situations were handled. They pointed out how data might often be initially collected for one purpose but hoped to be applied by a different team and how a little advance planning can make this possible. If you missed the talk, you can still take advantage of the replay here.

Schooling on Kubernetes and Data Analytics

Heading into the fall, the HPE DEV team invited Nigel Poulton, reknowned author and K8s expert, to come back on August 25th to reprise his Kubernetes 101 session that he gave at the HPE Discover 2021 Edge-to-Cloud Conference. Nigel walked us through the basics of Kubernetes in one of our most highly attended sessions yet, which you can catch in this replay.

For our September 22nd session, we focused on how organizations that have progressed along their digital transformation journey are now looking at the next set of workloads and processes to modernize. For many, this includes Data and Analytics. HPE Ezmeral data science experts, Matt Maccaux and Randy Thomasson, joined us to give their insights, discussing strategic best practices and offering helpful tips for real-world applications.

And they just keep coming

The year 2021 closed out with two additional Munch & Learn sessions; one on using HPE Ezmeral Unified Analytics and another on Redfish. Replays of those sessions are available through our calendar page. The Munch & Learn sessions proved quite popular, bring in over 1200 attendees over the course of the year. This success sparked the launch of a new set of technology talks which the HPE Developer team also offers on a monthly basis called Meetups. Whereas the Munch & Learn sessions bring in industry luminaries to cover emerging industry trends, the Meetups are opportunities to dig down deep into new technologies, inviting product experts to come in and talk on detail about a given subject. You can learn more about these meetups in this blog post and check the schedule for upcoming talks and video replays.

Keep checking back to see what new topics will be covered for HPE DEV Munch & Learns on our schedule so you don’t miss any of these fun and engaging discussions. Better yet, subscribe to our HPE DEV Newsletter. In it, you’ll find information on our upcoming Munch & Learn sessions as well as learn about everything else that’s new.