Containers promised speed, agility, and scalability — but they also came with a catch: ephemerality. While this worked well for stateless applications, enterprises quickly realized that true digital transformation required more than just lightweight packaging; it required persistency.

This session takes you on a journey through the evolution of persistence in the container ecosystem. We’ll start by looking back at the era of virtual machines and how VMware changed the way we thought about infrastructure, availability, and storage. From there, we’ll explore the challenges that arose when containers first took the stage — and how the introduction of the Container Storage Interface (CSI) marked a turning point for enabling reliable, consistent storage.

Finally, we’ll bring it all together by examining how modern storage solutions like Portworx Enterprise are delivering enterprise-grade persistency, high availability, and data mobility for containerized applications. Whether you’re just starting with Kubernetes or running production workloads at scale, this session will help you understand where we’ve come from, why persistence matters more than ever, and how to make containers a foundation for lasting business outcomes.