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Edge Computing at Chick-fil-A

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171–180 of 401 posts

Re: Edge Computing at Chick-fil-A

#171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey! Caleb here... I'm the lead SRE building the clusters on the restaurants. Each individual restaurant gets it's own cluster (we aren't fully deployed yet). There are too many network latency challenges and too much immaturity around federated clusters to take the route (unfortunately). We currently use gitops, which houses all the configs per cluster in a single repo per restaurant (CRAZY amount of corgis!)... we…

What were the main issues you faced with Helm?

The primary challenge was just reasoning with the template and using Helm at scale... ie; what exactly did we deploy on those hundreds of varying clusters?

Other issues included; tiller would sometimes become unstable... version mismatch issues between helm local and roller... lack of a clear, outage free canary deployment... we even found cases where helm would not cleanup after itself during a deployment and retain previous config settings within k8s.

Re: Edge Computing at Chick-fil-A

#173
post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The quoted definition of bigotry as "intolerance toward those who hold different opinions from oneself" is from the New Oxford American Dictionary, from Oxford University Press (the OED people). If that's what Google is using, I don't think I can rely on your definition of "crappy."

Yep, it's a crappy definition that does not reflect current usage. It doesn't even reflect the definition in the OED, if you want to check there. 'Bigotry' is not limited to difference of opinion. Nobody uses it like that, you can take a look at the quoted usage examples here, which are from current publications. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bigotry

The OED is a historical dictionary; the Oxford Dictionary of English and the New Oxford American Dictionary are explicitly meant to reflect more current usage. At any rate, I think this is getting awfully pedantic; the definition you linked is "obstinate or intolerant devotion to one's own opinions and prejudices," which seems similar enough that I'm not really sure what the point of this argument is. Given that I'm fairly sure the point of this was whether Chick-Fil-A's executives and in-the-company's-name giving exhibits bigotry, by any dictionary anyone's linked to, the answer is "yes."

Re: Edge Computing at Chick-fil-A

#174
This is a pretty cool example of cybernetics ala Stafford Beer - constant information and reaction to streamline production. I'm excited to see this be brought in to more production (though maybe it has, and most places aren't as upfront as this). It's truly a shame the Chilean experiment in the early 70s didn't work out.

On a side note, it's interesting that Kubernetes is the word from which cybernetics is derived, meaning "governance".

Re: Edge Computing at Chick-fil-A

#175

Since we have a highly available Kubernetes cluster with data replicated across all nodes .. This sounds like one of the more cutting-edge bare-metal kubernetes setups I've heard of! Curious what the kubernetes implementation / configuration looks like for the setup they've described. Particularly in terms of HA-cluster k8s configuration, networking solutions integrated, and replicated storage. Considering there is n…

Well, it’s a 6 man team so most of our trade offs were for expedience, not the worlds greatest architecture. We cheated and sync’d data using a HA MongoDB setup amongst the cluster. RKE for K8s clustering was a life saver (nothing easier at this point on bare metal IMO), although RKE can be brittle at times.

Re: Edge Computing at Chick-fil-A

#176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love seeing this argument. It's like you people think you can raise any arbitrary instance of hate/intolerance/ bigotry onto a criticism-proof pedestal simply by brandishing a dictionary. Like, who are the real bigots: Nazis, or the nasty people who have the gall to disagree with their racist, antisemitic, etc. views? Is the answer not obvious? Does the question send you scuttling back under your dictionary? I'm fi…

You're missing the point. I'm not concerned about the word. I'm concerned about the definition - those quickest to cry bigot are often guilty of acting like one themselves. Case-in-point: Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey being forced to apologise for eating at Chick-fil-A during LGBT Month. What kind of bizarre intolerant nonsense is that? Another case-in-point: Boston and Chicago mayors claim "Chick-fil-A values are not [our…

That's very intolerant of you to cry bigot about people who support LGBT rights.

Totally bizarre intolerant nonsense.

Re: Edge Computing at Chick-fil-A

#177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We will have an order of magnitude more cloud datacenters than AWS! :)

Do you also have a CDN (Chicken Delivery Network)? (Stolen from a guy in a slack channel.)

My coworkers found this one quite amusing.

Re: Edge Computing at Chick-fil-A

#178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting - why? (this is Caleb, one of the authors and lead SRE for the project)

Interesting - why? Because more than one person on the team has a background in meteorology, and to them a localized cloud event is "fog." I think it started as a joke, but it just kind of stuck. It helps that our events that require localized cloud infrastructure are sporadic, just the way real fog is. And just like real fog, we don't always know where it will be. Once or twice a year we have to deploy about 150 dev…

That is epic, and i am stealing that name.

Re: Edge Computing at Chick-fil-A

#179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing I question is what kind of WAN link a single chicken fast food restaurant can get, or is economical At this point, I don't think it's a problem for CFA. CFA doesn't try to go into every little town in the nation like McDonald's. It's expansion is very deliberate and only seems to go into very high value locations, where internet presumably isn't a problem. Moreover, landlords fall all over themselves to lan…

Meh. Unless you personally own a franchise, or work for corporate, this is pure conjecture. The article did mention if a failed node is detected, a next-day restore 'disk' is delivered to the store, so obviously that is faster/more reliable than random ISP.

Having a chickfila greatly increases realestate value for the landlord though, more so than other restaurant chains like McDonalds.

Re: Edge Computing at Chick-fil-A

#180

Interesting that they use Kubernetes exclusively for edge computing resources (as opposed to their cloud architecture). Never really considered this approach before.

If you decide to play around with it, we use RKE to build and manage the k8s environments locally.
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