In holding to its promise made last November, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) today announced global availability of its Container Platform. 

The HPE Container Platform, launched at the KubeCon 2019 conference in San Diego, is a Kubernetes-focused platform that allows customers to deploy cloud native and non-cloud native applications on any infrastructure, public cloud, or edge location including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), or Microsoft Azure.

The platform taps HPE’s acquisition of artificial intelligence (AI) and big data software vendor BlueData and MapR as the hardware vendor continues its strategic pivot toward an “as-a-service” model. It allows a container to be built once and deployed with “one click” on any bare metal, virtual machines (VMs), and cloud instances. This is designed to make it easier for enterprise IT departments to speed up the deployment of their containerized infrastructure and reduce developer workload.

While most containers today run on VMs or cloud instances, HPE has opted to take a different route that will not require HPE hardware and instead will run on bare-metal or virtualized infrastructure. The idea is that this approach will simplify the transition to Kubernetes and adoption of cloud technologies both on-premises and in public cloud.

The challenge for HPE in this crowded space, even more so than the enterprise hardware that forms the bulk of the company's business, will be proving itself and its bare-metal offerings as a worthy adversary to competitors such as IBM and its recent acquisition of Red Hat, and VMware.

Tom Phelan, a fellow for big data and storage organization at HPE, in an interview with SDxCentral said the platform’s bare-metal deployment capability is a “differentiator.” 

“As we've demonstrated, HPE can offer the security and the resource isolation that will permit containers to run well on bare metal as opposed to running in the VMware solution,” Phelan said.

To address security concerns, Phelan explained that the platform deploys all application clusters as non-privileged mode to immediately reduce the attack plane. It has also been integrated with HPE's “silicon root of trust,” which allows for the customer and HPE to verify that no changes have been made in the operating system code or Docker runtime code. 

“We are doing active work to demonstrate that we can deploy Kubernetes successfully on bare metal,” Phelan added. “We believe that the feature sets allow HPE to position itself favorably in that competitive marketplace.”

Along with its bare metal, HPE claims its platform is differentiated in the market by using an unaltered version of Kubernetes. This should help interoperability across cloud platforms compared to other options that might use altered Kubernetes iterations. Phelan, for example, cited the use of Kubernetes on top of Red Hat’s OpenShift requires a non-open source platform, calling it a “bad deal.” 

“We definitely want to stay open source here,” Phelan said, “However, I'm glad to see that with the newer versions of OpenShift as it's been acquired by IBM is moving closer to an open source solution for Kubernetes.” 

Many of HPE's rivals have bolstered their container and cloud native plays with IBM buying Red Hat and the tighter Dell-VMware-Pivotal-Heptio integrations. However, HPE has yet to make a similar move, but is working more closely with Kubernetes distributors like Rancher Labs.

Phelan said that HPE has its eyes on the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) roadmap for players both large and small that are “key to the Kubernetes, open source environment.”