KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America is back, and Portworx by Everpure returns as a Platinum sponsor.

From November 9–12, our team will be at the Salt Palace Convention Center in Salt Lake City, connecting with customers, partners, and the cloud-native community. Coming off a year of momentum at KubeCon Europe in Amsterdam, KubeCon India in Mumbai, and KubeCon Japan in Yokohama, we’re bringing that same energy to Utah.

This year, we’re focused on the three areas that come up in nearly every customer conversation: rethinking virtualization, modernizing applications, and building platforms ready for AI workloads.

Here’s what we have planned.

Make Data Management the Simplest Part of Kubernetes

Ask a platform team what runs on their clusters today and the answer keeps getting longer. The containerized applications they’ve been scaling for years. The virtual machines they inherited and can’t simply switch off. And now AI workloads, arriving faster than most roadmaps anticipated.

Three very different sets of demands, converging on one platform. Kubernetes has settled the compute question—the data layer is where most teams still get stuck.

The community data tells the same story. 74% of organizations plan to modernize or migrate VMs to Kubernetes. 44% now run AI/ML workloads on it, up sharply year over year. And 86% cite storage—not GPUs—as their number one AI cost concern.

That’s the idea behind everything we’re showing at KubeCon. Kubernetes manages your VMs and containers. Portworx automates, protects, and unifies their data:

• Automate: Self-service provisioning through Kubernetes APIs, with Day 2 operations like resizing, backup, HA, and failover driven by policy rather than tickets
• Protect: Container-aware resilience with up to zero-RPO synchronous disaster recovery, application-consistent backup, encryption, and immutability
• Unify: One data layer for containers, VMs, and AI workloads across 20+ Kubernetes distributions and any storage backend, from edge to core to cloud

Kick Off with Day 0

VM on Kubernetes Day

• Date: Monday, November 9
• Time: 12:30–5:00 PM MT
• Location: Salt Lake Marriott Downtown at City Creek, a two-minute walk from the Salt Palace

Virtualization is moving to Kubernetes, and the question is no longer whether VMs belong there, it’s how to run them well.

VM on Kubernetes Day has become one of the most anticipated Day 0 experiences in the KubeCon ecosystem, with sold-out sessions in Atlanta, Amsterdam, and Mumbai. In Salt Lake City, we’re dedicating an afternoon to how KubeVirt brings virtual machines onto the same platform as your container workloads, so legacy applications come along without being left behind, and without platform sprawl.

You’ll hear from across the ecosystem, including SUSE, Red Hat, Spectro Cloud, Tigera, Isovalent, and Portworx.

Here’s what to expect:

• Kickoff Keynote—Setting the stage on where Kubernetes-native virtualization is headed
• Fireside Chat: Virtbench—A look at the open source, vendor-neutral benchmarking tool for validating VM performance on any KubeVirt cluster and storage backend, now part of the KubeVirt project
• Migrating from VMware to Kubernetes—A real-world look at how enterprises are consolidating VMs and containers on a single platform
• Networking Session with Tigera and Isovalent—Key networking design considerations for running KubeVirt in production
• Platform Session with SUSE and Spectro Cloud—Platform strategies for running virtualized workloads at scale
• Modern Virtualization Technology Panel—Where KubeVirt makes sense today, what still blocks adoption, and what comes next
• Hands-On Lab: Portworx and OpenShift Virtualization—A guided walkthrough of deploying and managing VMs on Kubernetes, followed by a happy hour to close out the day

Whether you’re evaluating KubeVirt, planning a VMware migration, or looking to unify VMs and containers on a single control plane, this event is designed to give you practical insights you can take back to your team.

Seats are limited. Register for VM on Kubernetes Day — Salt Lake City

Partner Gatherings

We’ll be out in the wider ecosystem on Day 0 as well. Find the Portworx team at Red Hat Commons and at the SUSE happy hour, both good opportunities to talk shop before the main conference begins. Details and registration links to follow.

Catch Our Session at KubeCon

Sponsored Demo: CSI Won’t Save You—Why “CSI Support” Is Not a Storage Strategy and You Are Being Set Up to Fail

• Date: Tuesday, November 10
• Time: 5:15–5:35 PM MT
• Location: Demo Theater, Solutions Showcase floor

“CSI compliant” is often treated as a checkbox for running stateful and virtualized workloads on Kubernetes. In practice, that checkbox hides some significant assumptions. CSI plug-ins start the journey—they don’t finish it.

This session examines the responsibilities CSI deliberately leaves out, why those omissions matter in production, and what they cost platform teams on Day 2. Through practical examples, we’ll show where Portworx picks up where CSI stops: resilience, disaster recovery, and data mobility—the capabilities teams expect from their storage layer and CSI alone was never designed to deliver.

If you run databases, virtual machines, or any workload with a hard recovery requirement, this one is for you.

Visit the Portworx Booth

During the main conference, you’ll find us at booth #191 on the Solutions Showcase floor, positioned near the secondary entrance at one of the busiest points on the floor.

We’re taking a different approach to the booth this year. Rather than running scheduled presentations, we’ve built the space around interaction first and conversation second:

• Plinko and Gachapons: Play for prizes, then talk through what you’re working on with our team
• Daily Grand Prize: A brand new iPhone Duo, awarded once a day, every day of the show
• Book Signings: Get a signed hard copy of the The VM Professional’s Field Guide to Kubernetes twice daily on Tuesday and Wednesday
• Technical Deep Dives: Whiteboard sessions and architecture reviews with our engineers
• Live Demos: Portworx Enterprise and Portworx Backup across VMs, containers, and AI workloads

Meet with Our Team

We’ll be hosting 1:1 meetings at the booth on Tuesday and Wednesday, 10:00 AM–5:00 PM, for deeper conversations around:

• Virtualization transformation and VMware alternatives
• Running mixed VM, container, and AI workloads on a single platform
• Data protection, resiliency, and Day 2 operations at scale

If you’re planning your next phase of modernization, this is a great opportunity to dive in. Schedule a meeting to book time with our experts at the show.

Why Attend with Portworx?

KubeCon is about community and innovation, and our mission is to help you run data services and applications on Kubernetes with enterprise-grade reliability and simplicity. Whether you’re exploring virtualization on Kubernetes, managing databases at scale, or building a platform ready for AI workloads, Portworx is built to help you succeed.

See You in Salt Lake City

KubeCon is where ideas meet execution, and we’re glad to be part of it again.

Join us at VM on Kubernetes Day, visit booth #191 at KubeCon, or connect with our team to talk through your plans. We’d love to hear what you’re working on. Register for KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America.