It is certainly never easy to port existing software production pipelines and operations to a cloud native or, more typically, to a mix and match of cloud, bare metal and on-premises server environments. This assumption certainly held true for the situation T-Mobile was in during its digital journey . But while T-Mobile’s operations are on a gargantuan scale of magnitude compared to most organizations, T-Mobile succeeded by applying many of the same practices any organization needs to rely on, whether for a 10-person shop or if the company is Google. This includes an increasing reliance on GitOps for version control (VC) and repository functions but also as a way to combine all data access and functions into a single source to help manage the enormous complexity of multi-cloud and server environments, including, of course, Kubernetes deployments.

One of T-Mobile’s main goals was moving “a lot of those pieces out of the traditional location where they might be in a database of inside of a certain system of record, and a service registry and more into a repository. So,  we're able to recreate things on the go to manage our user base in a more dynamic fashion,” Philip Marc Schwartz, principle engineer, software, T-Mobile, said. “It's been an eye-opening experience to be able to work through the problems that you see with those systems as you're trying to get them working. And it's very interesting to see those problems solved where you can really work on them in a finite level.”

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