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Edge Computing at Chick-fil-A

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Re: Edge Computing at Chick-fil-A

#271

Post by imglorp »

zzzeek wrote: post #149
timdorr wrote: post #3

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…

Volume pricing maybe? 2,000 stores, so around 3,000 units.

Re: Edge Computing at Chick-fil-A

#272

Post by beckler »

max_im wrote: post #85

I work in midtown NYC near a Chick-fil-a location. Used to be a line down the block, went with a friend yesterday thinking we caught the line at a short time but turns out they were using smiley employees with ipads coordinating orders and that they were serving arguably more people than before. Very impressed with how seamlessly they've integrated tech in their brick and mortars in contrast with the countless "cashl…

I have a friend who used to be a shift manager at Chick-fil-A. I can't remember exactly what he called that process... It was like meet and greet or walk and talk, but it's surprisingly efficient for the drive thru. He said it cuts down the average wait time for customers around 15% at his location.

I don't know what it would be like at NYC since it's not a drive thru.

Re: Edge Computing at Chick-fil-A

#273

Post by uncreativebrian »

mastazi wrote: post #205
zzzeek wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Intel NUCs come in a wide price range (for example on Newegg the Celeron-based NUC is $130)

This is Brian -- I wrote the article (I suspect I will be typing that a lot tonight). We do clusters with 3 nodes per restaurant, so at full scale (when we have rolled out to every restaurant in the chain) that will be ~6000 nodes, and growing by new stores * 3 going forward. This will support an estimated 100k IoT "things" of various types in the next year and a half to two years (estimate)

Re: Edge Computing at Chick-fil-A

#274

Post by uncreativebrian »

086421357909764 wrote: post #51
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's actually suprising that people think they're not "normal" computers. I provisioned a few of them and they're little beasts. Most in use are I7, 16-32gb ram, Dual NVME. The Skulltrail nucs are extremely powerfull and on the lower end the atom based units are solid too. I also ran a nuc in my car for a while, mostly stumbling radio / wifi spectrum as I drove around, but it was perfect with its relatively low power…

This is Brian -- I wrote the article. Super cool use for a NUC! I'm going to follow the links and check out what you did some more.

Re: Edge Computing at Chick-fil-A

#275

Post by pvg »

Fellshard wrote: post #265
pvg wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bigotry does not just mean 'intolerance towards those who hold different opinions from oneself.' It's a silly definition, not what I want it to mean.

Language does not operate on the basis of what the speaker _wants_ it to mean.

I don't understand what ghost windmill you are tilting at here. At all. It certainly doesn't seem to be anything I've actually said.

Re: Edge Computing at Chick-fil-A

#276

Post by uncreativebrian »

trhway wrote: post #34
timdorr wrote: post #3

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.

Interesting as it seemed that smarter edge/iot nodes would be like ARM/RaspPi, yet it seems it may get even as high as (or just straight to) Intel nuc.

This is Brian -- I wrote the article. For what its worth, we considered trying to run our clusters on an array of cell phones since they would natively support connectivity fallback and pack a real effecient resource punch in a small footprint. One of our engineers came up with that idea. With the challenges compiling on ARM and the relative ease of moving forward with x86, we went that way to start. We tried really hard to balance the "ideal" with the short term "MVP", and I think we landed in a decent spot with the NUCs. They give us enough power to run the things we need in the short term, and we have some capacity for horizontal scale in the future as our needs increase. We tried to think "cloud native" at the edge as much as we could without truly being a cloud.

Re: Edge Computing at Chick-fil-A

#277

Post by clubm8 »

School-Cotton wrote: post #119
max_im wrote: post #85

I work in midtown NYC near a Chick-fil-a location. Used to be a line down the block, went with a friend yesterday thinking we caught the line at a short time but turns out they were using smiley employees with ipads coordinating orders and that they were serving arguably more people than before. Very impressed with how seamlessly they've integrated tech in their brick and mortars in contrast with the countless "cashl…

They've been doing this for several years at least (employees taking orders of people in line). I think since before the iPad was released.

> They've been doing this for several years at least (employees taking orders of people in line). I think since before the iPad was released.

Wendy's used to do this around 91/92 (clipboard, not iPad)

I think they ditched it with the smoking sections.

Re: Edge Computing at Chick-fil-A

#278

Post by uncreativebrian »

TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #221
thomasdelteil wrote: post #49

On a related note, Chick-fil-A using Deep Learning models for object detection with MXNet to track how long fries have been waiting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Uuq_cX8b1M

This seems like such an over-engineered solution. It would've been much simpler to have a plate with multiple pressure sensors and a multi-color LED per spot. When you set the fries down on the sensor it activates and the LED turns green. After X amount of time the LED can turn yellow, meaning that it's becoming stale. Finally, after X+N time has passed and it's no longer fresh it can turn red. Removing the fries tur…

This was a good learning experience for our engineers at our Innovation Center at Georgia Tech in Atlanta. It may bear fruit in the form of a useful solution in the future, though. What is unique to Chick-fil-A is 'volume'. We do a lot of sales in our restaurants, so anything we can do to try and make our team members lives easier is important to us. We want them to enjoy their jobs and we want to do the best we can to consistently create high quality food experiences for our customers. Our teams in restaurants are the heroes, but we are trying to use technology to help them do what they do.

Re: Edge Computing at Chick-fil-A

#280

Post by jorblumesea »

That level of infrastructure investment is really playing the long game, especially for a brick and mortar business. I often feel like "traditional businesses" see technology's disruption effects but not the positives they can bring. Other businesses could benefit from this example.
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