Case Study: T-Mobile accelerates deployment speed and Kubernetes scale with Cloud Native Computing Foundation

How T-Mobile is leveraging Kubernetes to handle iPhone-launch scale

T-Mobile, the third-largest wireless carrier in the U.S., faced a significant challenge with agility, as it once took seven months to get new code to production. While an initial move to Pivotal Cloud Foundry helped, not all applications, particularly those in Docker containers, ran optimally, leading them to seek a container orchestrator from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) vendor ecosystem to meet requirements for high availability, persistent storage, and seamless upgrades.

After building an initial open-source Kubernetes platform, the team switched to Pivotal Container Service (PKS) to gain operational efficiencies. The solution from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation's ecosystem enabled T-Mobile to handle massive scale, such as iPhone launch traffic, and drastically improved deployment times. The impact was substantial, with teams reducing the time to provision services from five days to five seconds and achieving 95% of deployments during the day with zero customer impact.

T-Mobile

James Webb

Member of Technical Staff