How T-Mobile Deployed Portworx for Flexible Storage
Portworx sponsored this podcast.
T-Mobile Web Backend: Kubernetes, Cloud Foundry, and Portworx for Flexible Storage.mp3
T-Mobile knows a thing or two about how waves of traffic can put a strain on an e-commerce website. At least twice a year its site gets inundated by customers and potential customers — In October each year when the new phones are released, and again in December, this time for the holiday gift-buying season.
T-Mobile has relied on container platform for managing its website for several years now, and Kubernetes has proved to be instrumental in helping the company scale up the site to meet these peak demands, said James Webb, T-Mobile Cloud Foundry platform architect, in an episode of The New Stack Makers podcast recorded at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon last month in Seattle.
Webb is part of an operations team that makes IT resources easily available to other business units within the company, so they can facilitate their own DevOps-styled practices to quickly update and iterate on customer-facing tools. Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes have been most useful in setting up these self-serve services, Webb said.
As has Portworx, which has been instrumental in helping connect these cloud native tools with back-end storage resources. Webb was joined in this podcast by Venkat Ramakrishnan, Portworx vice president of engineering, to explain more of the nuances of cloud native storage. Portworx “allows you to deliver these highly-available services for your container orchestrator,” he said.
“For example, a pod gets scheduled on one of the nodes. And [if] for some reason the node goes down, the scheduler will reschedule that node. Portworx automatically manages the availability of that data for that pod in any other node on that Kubernetes cluster,” he explained. “At the same time, it provides a level of abstraction for customers so they can specify the characteristics of the kind of storage they want.”
In this Edition:
3:25: So you’re running this Kubernetes deployment in house? What was the pain point that led you to Kubernetes in the first place?
5:10: Did you have to change the way you were developing applications?
10:51: Do you carry that persistence with the container?
14:08: Can you talk a bit about your scaling mechanisms?
20:02: What are you actually using to hold the data?
27:55: What are some of your goals for 2019?
The Cloud Foundry Foundation and KubeCon + CloudNativeCon are sponsors of The New Stack.
Feature image: James Webb (right), Venkat Ramakrishnan.