201–210 of 401 posts
"I have some Raspberry Pi's in my basement and at my vacation home"
VS
"I'm keeping bare metal close to the action with our uniquely scalable Edge Computing implementation"
They call their "cloud": Cloud-Fil-A. Par excellence.
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No, there is some hand-waving about "kitchen equipment" and "low latency". No business case for avoiding more traditional architecture.
We have frequent internet outages and still need to run compute loads at the edge.
What are you computing? This is what everyone is wondering.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Linux is general is not a real-time system, in that you cannot get deterministic response time from it. For example I'm guessing it doesn't matter if one of your timers are a second late due to Linux deciding to swap a process out or prioritise some upgrade check but imagine if your time constraints were a lot tighter. Similarly if you're attempting to track food on a conveyor belt and Linux decides to prioritise the…
So far we’ve been satisfied with Linux (Ubuntu 18.04 to be exact) and it’s overall capabilities.
Also, don’t forget that cost at scale is a big factor... doing things perfectly but expensively is not profitable at 2k locations.
If 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.
I'm just trying to understand, I see three of those machines, inside a pretty nice rack, with the switches, routers, a keyboard, I would assume some fairly high quality hard drive / RAID type of thing etc. then the blog post claims "We run our Edge infrastructure on commodity hardware that costs us, ballpark, $1000/restaurant. ". Just the intel nuc I can find on newegg alone costs $349 each, with no memory or harddri…
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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.
Such a deep commitment to an evidence-based technology approach to business is super surprising from a company that says its corporate purpose is "To glorify God by being a faithful steward of all that is entrusted to us..." That sort of dissonance is always so confusing to me.
Kidding aside, do you guys do maintenance on Sundays or is that forbidden by company policy?
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Did you RTFA? Did they say anything about collecting customer data? Why the heck did you bring this up, even?
https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html Somehow I missed the couple paragraphs mentioning kitchen equipment, and only saw the "Why does a restaurant company like Chick-fil-A want to deploy Kubernetes at the Edge?" bits. Those don't really give me any idea of what they're doing with the servers. Thank you for the rude comment that doesn't even answer my question, though.
I've never worked for chickfila, but I've designed a number of restaurants kitchens before.
Chickfila has a large demand for using data driven solutions. Here are some common issues restaurants face:
1. How much food needs to be ordered? Excess food ends up being tossed out, sometimes it gets lost somewhere in the back of the walkin.
2. What days will be most busy based on major events happening in the area? How is this measured? How will we inform the manager about these changes so they can have more employees during this timeframe?
3. How are we going to know which food
4. How will we know when a piece of equipment needs maintenance, or if its done at all? (Grease traps, hood filter cleaning)
5. How are we going to track the customer experience?
6. How will we prevent cross contamination during preptime using camera systems?
7. During rush hour how can we ensure fries arent going to go stale and served effectively? E.g. computer vision. Where is that data going to be stored at?
8. If a customer has had a bad food experience how are we going to track the exact problem that happened?
9. How are we going ensure data redundancy when our ISP has internet outages? Whats the backup plan.
10. How can we ensure the filets were getting from sysco or whatever vendor is the right thickness tolerance? This will affect food temperate curve graph and quality of filet
11. How can we be sure rules are being enforced during rushhour, especially with new hires?
12. How are we going to measure effectivenesd of training protocols in chickfila and get feedback from staff for improvements?
13. How are we going to keep track of all the food inventory?
14. How are we keeping track of our parts distribution for service tech (JIT equipment?)
15. How are we gojng to automate the Profit and Loss support for managers?
16. How are we going to know our vegetable supply doesnt have ecoli? What bigdata metrics are we getting from vendors for this?
17. Why are customers given X chickfila store poor reviews?
18. How will we keep track of all the information used in each store(plans, equipment, etc)
Note corporate needs to keep track of the food quality being churned out at each store. It needs to be tracked... there is alot of data. And alot of systems to house and transfer that data
When it comes to Chick-fil-A, there's also the regressive side in addition to the modern and traditional sides. https://hornet.com/stories/chick-fil-a-anti-lgbtq-donations-...
Your comment is essentially "the owners hold certain values I disagree with regarding sexuality, therefore I'm surprised their technical team is any good." I don't see how that follows.
To make the point more directly for you, I think and I’m guessing the poster thinks we ought not to normalize certain kinds of discriminatory corporate behavior by just looking away and cheerfully admiring their oh-so-efficient tech stack.