T-Mobile Improves Customer Experience, Lowers Costs of Kubernetes Storage Using AWS

The company used Amazon EFS to deploy a new, modern version of a legacy application that ran on dedicated on-premises servers. The application’s architecture made it difficult to scale, requiring the purchase of additional hardware to support it and driving up costs. It also required significant time spent by internal teams to set up and configure, taking time away from more critical projects. Now, the updated version is based on a microservices architecture, which overcomes the limitations of the on-premises application. “We worked with AWS support teams and their internal experts to ensure these solutions worked for us,” says Chandrasehar. “In just months, we migrated several on-premises workloads into production in the cloud.”

“In building on AWS, we’ve been able to leverage its expertise at every step of our cloud journey,” says Darron Webb, vice president of product & technology, cloud center of excellence, T-Mobile.

The company’s migration process required transitioning applications to container-based environments. Many of these container workloads share configuration files and dependencies and have persistent storage requirements. “Amazon EFS has become part of our solution for container-based workloads, such as APIs, web servers, monitoring tools, and CI/CD solutions. AWS has done a great job creating solutions that work with Kubernetes,” says Chandrasehar. Before Amazon EFS, it took weeks to provision storage, but now the company easily scales hundreds of nodes in Kubernetes. T-Mobile uses Amazon EFS with AWS CloudFormation templates from within Kubernetes, with Amazon EFS providing more elastic storage capacity on demand, removing the need for provisioning.

When new applications that require NFS are launched, the operations team directs them to use Amazon EFS. Self-service application deployment without the need to configure storage frees application development teams to spend time on more critical issues. “This makes our life easier because we don’t have to constantly provision Amazon EFS. It’s easy for us to add Amazon EFS on the fly to workloads when needed, which means storage is provisioned on demand and through self-service,” says Chandrasehar.

By leveraging the scalability of on-demand storage provisioning, T-Mobile has reduced its execution time by roughly 10–15 percent. Amazon EFS scales on demand to petabytes without causing disruption to applications. It automatically expands and contracts as files are added and removed, so applications have the storage they need, when they need it. As a result, T-Mobile now has more durable storage capacity for the long term and no longer needs to overprovision storage to meet its needs. This has helped the company save between 40 percent and 70 percent on storage costs.

Amazon EFS does not require changing existing applications or tools but allows access through a standard file system interface, making integration easy. “Amazon EFS reduces the costs and time we spend addressing storage. It scales seamlessly no matter how many applications it’s applied to. That frees us to focus on critical projects rather than on launching and managing storage solutions,” says Chandrasehar.

Switching to Amazon EFS has allowed T-Mobile to increase its agility, scalability, and reliability and to lower costs and provisioning time compared to its on-premises, open source storage options. “Those previous options required a lot of operational work and technical support, and moving to Amazon EFS saved us from a lot of these tasks,” says Chandrasehar. The migration of container-based workloads and legacy applications was seamless and accomplished quickly, taking place over the course of just a few months.

T-Mobile has been able to improve the customer experience as a result of the move to Amazon EFS. Chandrasehar says, “Initially, we wanted to enhance customer requests through social media, but we have also seen improved web, retail, and care experience for our customers.” T-Mobile plans to expand its use of AWS services. “AWS continues to evolve its solutions, always adding features and trying to make its customers’ lives better,” says Webb. “We use AWS solutions as often as possible in our architecture patterns to take advantage of the tools and agility that the cloud offers.”