T-Mobile US doesn’t talk about its cloud-native efforts often, but there is a lot of activity happening behind the scenes on Kubernetes as the operator expands its vision for 5G.

Thom McCann, a senior manager at T-Mobile who leads the carrier’s cloud efforts, outlined his roadmap and vision for multi-cluster deployments of Kubernetes at scale during a presentation at this week’s Cloud Native Virtual Summit featuring Kubernetes.

T-Mobile US has, for almost two years now, been running more containers than virtual machines, he said. That container-based platform, which has been running for more than four years, has also allowed the operator to lower and keep its compute costs flat, according to McCann. 

“We continue to grow our usage on the cloud, but our costs have been maintained pretty much from a compute perspective — compute costs have been pretty level for quite a long time now,” he said at the event, adding that T-Mobile’s technology choices in the cloud during the last few years have contributed to its upswing in the market.

T-Mobile takes a varied approach to Kubernetes, wherein many applications are running on shared Kubernetes clusters, but applications that reach a certain scale or require a specific capacity or isolation are run on dedicated clusters, McCann explained. 

“One of the things that we think really drives the economics is that consistency,” he said. “Kubernetes isn’t necessarily magic dust. You’re not going to reduce your cost with Kubernetes if you don’t manage it correctly.”

In April, McCann claimed the carrier’s combination of centralized management of Kubernetes containers and a standardized approach to clusters via its Conducktor platform will help it slash $30 million in cloud costs during the next year.

The operator uses public clouds from Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure to run many of its customer-facing applications today, including its main site, home-based internet service, and integrations with third parties like Apple, Netflix, and biometric identification on mobile devices, but it’s vision goes much broader than that.

“Ultimately we’re going to land in a place where we talk about how to build a successful Kubernetes environment across the larger organization, and how that sets you up well for building applications coming down when we get to the world of 5G,” McCann said. 

Applications based on Kubernetes will continue to be the best way to take advantage of new compute opportunities delivered by 5G, he said.

“Someday we’ll look back and we’ll wonder how we ever lived with just no compute at the edge,” but that is going to change as 5G become standard and public cloud providers assemble a widespread footprint of mini data centers to deliver mobile edge compute, McCann said. 

“You will also see mobile compute on the edge directly connected to the towers and this is going to enable many new types of use cases,” he said. “And that’s going to be driven by Kubernetes.”

The investments IT shops are making in Kubernetes today will put them in better position to take advantage of these yet-to-be-seen opportunities in 5G, according to McCann.

“A lot of folks are still working out, you know, what it means to have this capability at the edge. But one thing is certain, and that is that Kubernetes is the ubiquitous orchestration platform that will provide that capability,” he said.