 live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, day four of our coverage of AWS re-invent continues. Lisa Martin here with Dave Vellante. You can tell it's day four. Yeah, you can tell it's day four. You get punchy? Yes. Did you know that the Vegas rodeo is coming into town? I'm kind of bummed I'm leaving tonight. Really? You rodeo fan? No. But to see a bunch of cowboys in Vegas? I'd like to see the Raiders. I'd like to see the Raiders in Vegas. There you go, yeah. Get tickets. Yeah, and the hockey team. Yeah. We have had an amazing event, Dave. theCUBE's 10th year covering re-invent, 11th re-invent. Our 10th year here, yeah. Yes. Yeah, I mean we covered remotely during COVID, but yeah. Yes, yes. Awesome content. Anything's jump out at you that we really, we love talking to AWS, the ecosystem, we got customer next. Anything's jump out at you that's really a kind of a key technology? The big story is the majority of AWS, you know. I mean people ask me, what's different under Adam than under Andy? And I'm like, really, it's the majority of AWS is what's different, you know. Ecosystem, connecting the dots, moving towards solutions. Yeah, that's the big thing. And it's, you know, in a way, it's kind of boring relative to other re-invents, which are like, oh wow, oh my God, they announced Outposts. So you don't see anything like that. It's more taking the platform to the next level, which is a good thing. The next level, it is a good thing. Speaking of next level, we have a couple of next level guests from T-Mobile joining us. We're going to be talking through their customer story, their business transformation with AWS. Glenn Kursingel joins us, the director of product and technology, and Nick Chris, senior manager of product and technology. Guys, welcome. Great to have you here on brand. You're on T-Mobile brand. I love it. I mean, we are always T-Mobile. I love it. So everyone knows T-Mobile, Glenn. You guys are in the digital commerce domain. Talk to us about what that is, what functions that delivers for T-Mobile. Yeah, so the digital commerce domain operates and runs a platform called the digital commerce platform. What this essentially does, it's a set of APIs that are headless that power the shopping experiences. When you talk about shopping experiences at T-Mobile, a customer comes to either a T-Mobile website or goes to a store. And what they do is they start with the discovery process of a phone. They take it through the process. They decide to purchase the phone. They add the phone to cart, and then eventually they decide to, you know, basically pull the trigger and buy the phone, at which point they submit the order. So that whole experience essentially from start to finish is powered by the digital commerce platform. Just this year, we have processed well over three and a half million orders, amounting to a billion and a half dollars worth of business for T-Mobile. Wow, big outcomes. Nick, talk about the before stage. Obviously the customer experience is absolutely critical because if it goes awry, people churn. We know that and nobody wants, you know, brand reputation is at stake. Talk about some of the challenges before that you guys faced. And how did you work with AWS and its partner ecosystem to address those challenges? Sure, yeah, so actually before I started working with Glenn on the commerce domain, I was part of T-Mobile's cloud team. So we were the team that kind of brought in AWS. And commerce platform was really the first tier one system to go 100% cloud native. And so for us, it was very much a learning experience and a journey to learn how to operate on the cloud and which was fundamentally different from how we were doing things in the old on-prem days. When you talk about headless APIs, you're talking, I don't know if you saw more in a Vogel's keynote this morning, but you talk about a loosely coupled system that you can evolve without ripping out the whole system or without bringing the whole system down. Can you explain that in a little bit more detail? Absolutely. So the concept of headless API exactly opens up that possibility. What it allows us to do is to build an operator platform that runs sort of loosely coupled from the user experiences. So when you think about this from a simplistic standpoint, you have a set of APIs that are headless and you've got the website that connects to it, the retail store applications that connect to it, as well as the customer care applications that connect to it. And essentially what that does is it allows us to basically operate all these platforms without being sort of tightly coupled to each other. Yeah, he was talking about this morning when AWS announced S3, there was just a handful of services, maybe it just two or three. I think now there's 200 and it's never gone down, it's never been replaced essentially. And so the whole thing was it's an asynchronous system that's loosely coupled and then you create that illusion of synchronicity for the customer. Exactly. Which was, I thought really well described, but maybe you guys could talk about what the genesis was for this system and take us kind of from the before or after, you know, the classic as was and as is. You talk about that? Yeah, I can start and then hand it off to Nick for some more details. So we started this journey back in 2016 and at that point T-Mobile had seven or eight different commerce platforms. Obviously you can think about the complexity involved in running and operating platforms. We've all talked about T-Mobile being the un-carrier. It's a brand that we've basically popularized in the telco industry. We would come out with these massive un-carrier moves and every time that announcement was made, teams had to scramble because you've got seven systems, seven teams, every single system needs to be updated. So that's where we started when we kicked off this transformational journey. Over time essentially we have brought it down to one platform that supports all these experiences and what that allows us to do is not only time to market gets reduced immensely but it also allows us to basically reduce our operational cost because we don't have to have teams running seven, eight systems, it's just one system with one team that can focus on making it a world-class platform. I think one of the strategies that definitely paid off for us because going all the way back to the beginning our little platform was powering just a tiny little corner of the web space, right? But even in those days we approached it from we're going to build functions in a way that is sort of agnostic to what the experience is going to be. So over time as we would build a capability that one particular channel needed primary, we were still thinking about all the other channels that needed it so now over a few years that investment pays off and you have basically the same capabilities working in the same way across all the channels. When did the journey start? 2016. 2016, yeah. It's been six years. What are some of the game changers in this business transformation that you would say? These are some of the things that really ignited our transformation. Yeah, there's particularly one thing that we feel pretty proud about which is the fact that we now operate what we call active, active stacks. What that means is you've got a single stack of the commerce platform start to finish that can run in an independent manner but we can also start adding additional stacks that are basically loosely coupled from each other but can run to support the business. What that basically enables is it allows us to run in active, active mode which itself is a big deal. From a system uptime perspective it really changes the game. It allows us to push releases without worrying about any kind of downtime. We've done canary releases. We are in the middle of retail season and we can introduce changes without worrying about it. And more importantly I think what it has also allowed us to do is essentially practice disaster recovery while doing a release. Because that's exactly what we do is every time we do a release we are switching between these separate stacks and essentially are practicing our DR strategy. So you do this, you separate across regions I presume. You got that right? Yes. But this was a really interesting conversation because as you well know in the on-prem world you never tested that disaster recovery. It was too risky because you're afraid you're going to take your whole business down. And you're essentially saying that the testing is fundamental to the implementation. Absolutely. It is the thing that you do for every release. So at least every week or so you are doing this. And in the old world, the active passive world on paper you had a bunch of capabilities and in incidents that are even less than say a full disaster recovery scenario you would end up making the choice not to use that capability because there was too much complexity to risk a problem. When we put this in place now I tell people everything we do got easier after that. Isn't it a challenge for you or how do you deal with the challenge? Correct me if it's not a challenge that sometimes Amazon services are not available in both regions. I think for instance the observability thing that they just announced this week is it's not cross region or maybe I'm getting that wrong but there are services where you might not be able to do data sharing across regions. How do you manage that? Or maybe there's different levels of certifications. How do you manage that discontinuity or is that not an issue for you? Yeah, I mean it is certainly a concern and so the stacks like Glenn said they are largely decoupled and what that means is practically every component and there's a lot of components in there. I have redundancy from an availability zone point of view but then where the real magic happens is when you come in as a user to the stack we're going to initially kind of lock you on one stack and then the key thing that we do is we understand the difference between what we would call the critical data so think of like your shopping cart and then contextual data that we can relatively easily reload if we need to. And so that critical data is constantly in an async fashion so it's not interrupting your performance being broadcast out to a place where we can recover it if we need to if we need to send you to another stack and then we call that dehydration and if you end up getting bumped to a new stack we rehydrate you on that stack and reload that contextual data. So to make that whole thing happen we rely on something we call the global cart store and that's basically powered by Dynamo. So Dynamo is highly reliable and multi-region. So and I presume you're doing some form of serverless maybe for the stateless stuff and maybe taking control of the runtime for the stateful things are you leaning into serverless and Lambda or not yet because you want control over the EC2 and the memory configs, what's that mean? I know we're going inside the plumbing a little bit but it's kind of fun. That's always fun if you went. Yeah and it has been a journey. Back in 2016 when we started we were all on EC2s and across over the last three or four years we have kind of gone through that journey where we went from EC2 to containers and we are at some point we'll get to where we will be serverless. We've got a few functions running but in that journey I think when you look at the full end of the spectrum we are somewhere towards the process of sort of going from containers to serverless. Yeah so today your team is setting up the containers they're fencing them off, fencing off the app and doing all that sort of semi heavy lifting. How do you deal with the, this is one of the things Lisa you and I were talking about is the skill sets. We always talk about this. What's your team look like and what are the skill sets that you've got that you're deploying? Yeah I mean as you can imagine it's a challenge and it's a highly specialized skill set that you need and we talk about cloud. You know I tell developers when we bring new folks and in the old days you could just be really good at Java and study that and be good at that for decades but in the cloud world you have to be wide in your breadth and so you have to understand those 200 services right and so one of the things that really has helped us is we've had a partner, so UST Global is a digital services company and they've really kind of been on the journey of the same timeline that we were and I had worked with them on the cloud team before it came to commerce and when I came to the commerce team we were really struggling especially from that operational perspective. The team was just not adapting to that new cloud reality they were used to the on-prem world but we brought these folks in because not only were they really able to understand the stuff but they had built a lot of the platforms that we were going to be leveraging for commerce with us on the cloud team. So for example we have built T-Mobile operates our own customized Kubernetes platform. We've done some stuff for serverless development, CI CD cloud security and so not only did these folks have the right skill sets but they knew how we were approaching it from a T-Mobile cloud perspective and so it's kind of fun to see when they came on board this journey with us we were both companies were relatively new in learning and now I look and I think that they're like a platinum sponsor these days here at AWS and so it's kind of cool to see how we've all grown together. A lot of evolution, a lot of maturation. Glenn I want to know if me and we're almost out of time here but tell me what the digital commerce domain you kind of talked about this in the beginning but I want to know what's the value in it for me as a customer? All of this under the hood plumbing, the maturation, the transformation how does it benefit me? Great question. So as a customer, all they care about is coming into, going to the website, walking into a store and without spending too much time completing that transaction and walk out. They don't care about what's under the hood, right? So this transformational journey from, like I talked about we started with EC2s back in the day it was what we call the Wild West on a cloud native platform to where we have reached today the journey we have collectively traversed with the USD has allowed us to basically build a system that allows a customer to walk into a store and not spend a whole hour dealing with a sales rep that's trying to sell them things. They can walk in and out quickly. They go to the website literally within a couple of minutes they can complete the transaction and leave. That's what customers want. It is. And that has really sort of helped us when you think about T-Mobile and the fact that we are now poised to be a leader in the US in Telco at this whole concept of systems that really empower the customers to quickly complete the transaction has been one of the key components of allowing us to kind of make that growth, right? So- Right, and a big driver revenue. Exactly. I have one final question for each of you. We're making an Instagram reel. So think about if you had 30 seconds to describe T-Mobile as a technology company that sells phones or a technology company that delights people. What would you say if you had a billboard? What would it say about that? Glenn, what do you think? So T-Mobile from a technology company perspective the whole purpose of setting up T-Mobile's shopping experience is about bringing customers in surprising and delighting them with the frictionless shopping experiences that basically allow them to come in and complete the transaction and move on with their lives. It's not about keeping them in the store for too long when they don't want to do it and essentially the idea is to just basically surprise and delight our customers. Perfect. Nick, what would you say? What's your billboard about T-Mobile as a technology company that's delivering great services to its customers? Yeah, I think Glenn really covered it well. What I would just add to that is I think the way that we are approaching it these days really starting from that 2016 period is we like to say we don't think of ourselves as a telco company anymore. We think of ourselves as a technology company that happens to do telco among other things, right? And so we've approached this from a point of view of we're here to provide the best possible experience we can to our customers and we take it personally when we don't reach that high bar and so what we've done in the last few years as a transformation has really given us the toolbox that we need to be able to meet that promise. Awesome, guys, it's been a pleasure having you on the program talking about the transformation of T-Mobile. Great to hear what you're doing with AWS, the maturation and we look forward to having you back on to see what's next. Thank you so much. Awesome, thank you so much. All right, for our guests and Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live enterprise and emerging tech coverage.