Unrelated but I've done a good amount of nonprofit work and everytime I've had to ask for food donations chickfila has given food free of charge.
Edge Computing at Chick-fil-A
181–190 of 401 posts
Re: Edge Computing at Chick-fil-A
#182Re: Edge Computing at Chick-fil-A
#183Earlier quoted context omitted.
Here's the abbreviated reason; Internet connectivity for restaurants stink. So we put our compute at the edge. Trust me... as an SRE I would much prefer we shove it in the cloud and call it a day, but alas... no such luck.
Yeah, but what compute? what are they computing? The driving need for edge computing is low-latency. There just isn't the need for it in a restaurant. I do hope they're not doing real-time control of kitchen equipment via something in a container, containers in Linux are nowhere near deterministic enough. This strikes me as someone who is familiar with only web technologies but unfamiliar with control systems attempt…
Could you define what is not deterministic about containerized computing?
Examples of things we are controlling are timers for food, cameras that can recognize and track food items, drying machines that will automatically trigger and fry fries.
Re: Edge Computing at Chick-fil-A
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
That doesn't mean the local cable company will put in $100k of poles and coax to your restaurant.
Also, McDonald's corporate owns all their real estate, franchisees, too.
Re: Edge Computing at Chick-fil-A
#185Can anyone explain what the actual problem is they're solving using 'edge computing'? I get the feeling this is a completely unnecessary use of technology.
>In a recent post, we shared about how we do bare metal clustering for Kubernetes on-the-fly at the Edge in our restaurants. One of the most common (and best) questions we got was “but why?”. In the post we will answer that question. [emphasis mine]
Luckily there's a whole article on that topic. I try to avoid "Did you read the article?" comments, but the first three sentences in the article tell you that this is the question they're answering.
Re: Edge Computing at Chick-fil-A
#186Earlier quoted context omitted.
They said in the article without getting super-specific that they have low-latency / high-throughput / time sensitive data processing needs in each restaurant. It sounds like they have a whole bunch of sensors tracking their inventory and food preparation pipeline. Other comments here link to other blog posts by them with more details about french fry done-ness deep learning models, for example (wacky but cool). If y…
I suppose I'm struggling to see how much of a requirement for low-latency data processing exists in a restaurant. There just isn't that much data there unless they're attempting to do real-time control of equipment (in which case, just use a regular control system). I can imagine a requirement for logging potentially, but thats not a low-latency requirement and the use-case for edge-computing is exactly that, low-lat…
It’s more about network outages than latency specifically... although in several remote locations latency is permanently low due to slow providers.
Re: Edge Computing at Chick-fil-A
#187We think of our Edge Computing environment as a “micro private cloud” We call local clouds "fogs."
Aren't most edge computing reffered to as fog-computing? Or is it just in academia
Re: Edge Computing at Chick-fil-A
#188Would just like to say Chick-fil-A should publish more like this. They are absolutely knocking it out of the park with tech. My wife and I are friends with a few operators (they don't have "owners"). I recall them, several years back, trying to get me to quit consulting to come work with them and open more stores. "Food service, ugghhh, no offense" I said. A friend whipped out her phone and showed me their really great in-house app that showed detailed analytics for her store (everything you could imagine) and tools for for doing purchasing and much more we didn't have time to get into. This is circa 2010 if I recall. For reference the iPhone SDK dropped in late 2007 and these folks were already way onboard with mobile. I was impressed.
Re: Edge Computing at Chick-fil-A
#189Unrelated but I've done a good amount of nonprofit work and everytime I've had to ask for food donations chickfila has given food free of charge.
Do you need to sign a purity pledge?
Re: Edge Computing at Chick-fil-A
#190If you want to see the actual hardware used at the restaurant, check out the previous blog post: https://medium.com/@cfatechblog/bare-metal-k8s-clustering-at... Spoiler: It's a stack of Intel NUCs.
NUCs are surprisingly well-built little machines. I have one in my car, and I give them my absolute seal of approval. I've heard of people running little VMware clusters on them too.
they've kind of a pain in the butt for us... For example, it would be nice for them to have remote admin, more than one NIC, not freak out when the HDMI is not plugged in, etc.