HPE Goes Gold with CNCF for Enterprise Kubernetes Deployments

[P_Sachdeva]

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) is now a Gold member of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). Over the past several months, HPE has made significant contributions to the open source community. These contributions are instrumental in helping enterprises modernize their applications across hybrid cloud, multi-cloud, and edge environments. As a Gold member, HPE emphasizes its continued dedication to promote open source projects.

CNCF hosts critical components of the global technology infrastructure, serving as the vendor-neutral home for many of the fastest-growing open source projects, including Kubernetes, Prometheus, and Envoy. Its goal is to build sustainable ecosystems for cloud-native software. HPE recognizes the crucial role CNCF plays in bringing together the world’s top developers, end users, and vendors and has been an active member of CNCF since 2017.

At HPE, our focus is on more than just next generation cloud-native applications. We are dedicated to delivering breakthrough innovation and a new approach to helping enterprises deploy containerized environments at scale for both cloud-native and non-cloud-native applications.  Our contributions range from delivering products and solutions for cloud-native storage and Kubernetes to providing advisory and professional support and training services focused on designing and implementing Kubernetes and cloud-native technologies. CNCF recently awarded HPE the Kubernetes Certified Service Provider (KCSP) designation, as a pre-qualified service provider with deep experience in helping enterprises successfully adopt and deploy Kubernetes.

HPE has actively collaborated with the open source community for many years, providing expertise and deep contributions to numerous open source projects. Our commitment to fostering innovation with open source Kubernetes and the container ecosystem has been accelerated through our acquisitions of BlueData and MapR. Building on these recent software acquisitions, HPE recently introduced our ground-breaking new container management solution: the HPE Container Platform.

The HPE Container Platform is an integrated turnkey solution with BlueData software as the multi-cluster container management control plane and the MapR distributed file system as the unified data fabric for persistent storage. HPE Container Platform provides the ability to deploy and manage multiple versions of 100% open source Kubernetes and was recently certified by CNCF as a Kubernetes Certified Distribution — ensuring conformance, interoperability, consistency, and access to the latest open source Kubernetes features.

This new platform uniquely addresses the requirements for large-scale enterprise Kubernetes deployments across a wide range of use cases, from machine learning and edge analytics to CI/CD pipelines and application modernization. IT teams can use it to manage multiple Kubernetes clusters with multi-tenant container isolation and pre-integrated persistent storage. It includes innovations such as KubeDirector, an open source project from HPE that enables organizations to run non-cloud-native stateful applications on Kubernetes without modifying code. The HPE Container Platform also provides developers with secure, on-demand access to their environments. This access lets them develop apps and release code faster, while providing the container portability benefits of build once and deploy anywhere.

More recently, HPE acquired Scytale, a founding contributor to CNCF’s SPIFFE (the Secure Production Identity Framework for Everyone) and SPIRE (the SPIFFE Runtime Environment) open source projects. The SPIFFE and SPIRE projects deliver a foundational capability—service identity authentication—for cloud- and container-deployed micro-services. The projects have rapidly grown in popularity, receiving contributions from Google, Pinterest, Square, Uber, and others.

The open source SPIFFE and SPIRE projects enable organizations to deliver secure, high performance, multi-cloud, and multi-tenant IT infrastructure more quickly to employees, customers, and partners. In fact, the CNCF Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) just promoted them from sandbox to incubation-level hosted projects. Learn more in this new blog post Bringing Trusted Computing to the Cloud from my colleague Sunil James, founder and CEO of Scytale, now at HPE. 

HPE looks forward to taking on new responsibilities and doubling down on our contributions within the CNCF as a Gold member. Working with CNCF, our goal is to accelerate the creation and adoption of open, standards-based data access; advance new capabilities for cloud-native applications and environments; and promote new technologies and solutions that support them.

Read the CFNC press release announcing HPE as a Gold member. You can also check out more information on HPE Container Platform and HPE’s open source initiatives. We also recommend you keep an eye out on the HPE DEV blog site for more interesting articles on containers, Kubernetes, and other open source offerings.

Prashant Sachdeva

Hewlett Packard Enterprise