After two years of only being able to meet virtually, HPE Developer Community members were excited to be able to connect with one another in-person at HPE Discover 2022 in the Hack Shack. It was an amazing event with more than 8,000 visitors. The event focused mostly on HPE GreenLake and all the 70+ new services that have been made available, from private cloud for the enterprise to data analytics (try some of them here in the HPE GreenLake Test Drive).

It was great to once again meet up with colleagues and customers face-to-face. I arrived early this year in order to help with the Hack Shack setup over the weekend. Our CEO, Antonio Neri, stopped by the booth while we were doing setup. He gladly agreed to take a picture with some of us members of the HPE Developer Community team. (He’s the one in blue and I’m to the right.)

Highlights of the week

The Hack Shack schedule was pretty intense, as usual. For those of you who may not have had the opportunity to stop by, you did miss out on quite a few cool activities. We had 13 interactive meetups focused on Open Source, how to take advantage of data using a data map, security, data protection, API integration, and infrastructure-as-code. We also hosted 5 software challenges based on our Workshop-on-Demand structure. The most popular software challenge this year was the one entitled VM Desired State Management in HPE GreenLake where one learned to manage an HPE GreenLake Private Cloud for Enterprise workload using Terraform.

In the front yard, I met soon-to-become new members of the HPE Developer Community after sharing with them a few simple, yet efficient, words and a quick demo of our developer portal. I also helped attendees participate in our software challenges. These software challenges were enjoyed by many and will be transformed over the summer into workshops that people can take through our Workshop-on-Demand catalog.

Another highlight of the week were the foosball challenges we engaged in with Hack Shack attendees. I remained unbeaten at the foosball table the entire week. And I even managed to deliver our HPE Developer Community message while playing. A peculiar, but effective, tactic I used to win, I must admit.

Many attendees decided to try our virtual treasure hunt. This simple scavenger-hunt style game allowed them to learn more about both the team and the different assets available in the HPE Developer Community portal. The winners were awarded Canakits and Raspberry Pi 4 computers during our Wednesday night party.

Next to the Hack Shack was a space called the Living Labs where HPE introduced the new trials experience for HPE GreenLake. The HPE Developer Community team expects to work closely in the near future with HPE GreenLake teams to provide more developer-related content for their catalog. A software challenge we developed for this Discover event – the Terraform provider for HPE GreenLake – will be one of the very first workshops on that list.

The introduction of the HPE GreenLake Developer portal

One of the most interesting announcements of the week was the introduction of the HPE GreenLake Developer portal. As HPE transitions to an as-a-service strategy, APIs and developers become more and more important. It would be illogical for HPE to offer a platform where customers would consume resources by clicking on well-designed User Interfaces. APIs must be made available and described properly so they can be leveraged to allow complete automation. Equally, providers should be developed to allow better interaction with industry-standard automation frameworks like Red Hat’s Ansible, Hashicorp Terraform, Chef, or Puppet. The HPE GreenLake developer portal aims at offering API access to customers, allowing them to integrate seamlessly with HPE GreenLake programmatically.

The evidence that Discover 2022 was a HPE GreenLake-centric event abounded. The design of the showcase floor reflected that, with beams of data feeding a central control center. As HPE shifts to this model, the personas the company addresses are also evolving. Not only do our solutions address the IT Ops administrators moving to a DevOps culture, but also the new data-driven engineers working on Data and ML Ops. All these personas develop code and need to interact seamlessly with HPE GreenLake offerings. The HPE Developer Community team is doing its best to facilitate this interaction. That’s why we will be here again next year with new opportunities to learn, content and fun activities!