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McDonalds Event Driven Architecture

medium.com

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Re: McDonalds Event Driven Architecture

#51

Post by BoorishBears »

guyzero wrote: post #44

Serious question, isn't think just rebuilding the same thing that commercial cloud pubsub offerings already provide?

I mean I'd expect if they're already all-in on AWS they'd just use Firehose with some deduplication instead of whatever home-brew fallback solution they described, but other than that it doesn't seem like they built much?

What's impressive to me is that they need all that architecture. Mcdonalds sells under 100 burgers a second from what I can find, their order load is probably bursty, so assume maybe all the orders come in the same third of the day, so 300 per second, and every burger is it's own order... that's still not that much.

One order is more than one operation when you're dealing with everything a place at McDonald's scale, but even if you multiply by a factor of 10 to account for analytics, compliance, etc. 3,000 operations per second? Does that really require an entire Kafka-driven event architecture?

Re: McDonalds Event Driven Architecture

#52

Post by 1123581321 »

achrono wrote: post #2

While this satisfies some idle curiosity, I don't really get what justifies spending the resources in posting such stuff. Is this a recruitment tactic somehow for such companies?

Recruitment but also retention. Some engineers want to publicly communicate their work at a recognizable company, or aspire to become the kind of company good enough to have a well-liked engineering blog. Providing that opportunity doesn’t cost much and means a lot.

Re: McDonalds Event Driven Architecture

#53

Post by aeyes »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #9
b20000 wrote: post #5

why does everything have to be microservice oriented and what's wrong with a simple monlithic application that runs the whole thing? also, when are those ice cream machines going to get fixed?

To your point, Shopify's monolith was handling 1.27M requests/sec on Black Friday: https://twitter.com/ShopifyEng/status/1597983918900510720 Thread: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1597983918900510720.html

Is running a separate instance of the monolith with a separate database for every store really "a monolith" withstanding 1.27M rps?

It's a bit like saying Magento served 1M rps on Black Friday leaving out the small but important detail that each individual store has separate infrastructure and manageable load.

Divide and conquer works, congrats to the Shopify team that their design decisions worked out for their use case. And obviously some parts of the system are still shared but my guess is that they are not part of the monolith.

Re: McDonalds Event Driven Architecture

#54

Post by spoils19 »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #9
b20000 wrote: post #5

why does everything have to be microservice oriented and what's wrong with a simple monlithic application that runs the whole thing? also, when are those ice cream machines going to get fixed?

To your point, Shopify's monolith was handling 1.27M requests/sec on Black Friday: https://twitter.com/ShopifyEng/status/1597983918900510720 Thread: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1597983918900510720.html

Exactly. I've written and maintained monoliths that handle close to ~20M requests per second, and it only went down once (when somebody tripped over the power cable!)

Re: McDonalds Event Driven Architecture

#55

Post by ehnto »

BoorishBears wrote: post #51
guyzero wrote: post #44

Serious question, isn't think just rebuilding the same thing that commercial cloud pubsub offerings already provide?

I mean I'd expect if they're already all-in on AWS they'd just use Firehose with some deduplication instead of whatever home-brew fallback solution they described, but other than that it doesn't seem like they built much? What's impressive to me is that they need all that architecture. Mcdonalds sells under 100 burgers a second from what I can find, their order load is probably bursty, so assume maybe all the orders…

I think you are underestimating how liberal some applications are, especially as analytics is one of their requirments. It's probably multiple events per thing you do. I wouldn't be surprised by 100+ events before even placing an order.

Re: McDonalds Event Driven Architecture

#56

Post by selcuka »

dbetteridge wrote: post #26
achrono wrote: post #2

While this satisfies some idle curiosity, I don't really get what justifies spending the resources in posting such stuff. Is this a recruitment tactic somehow for such companies?

It is often an OKR for senior/staff developers to write blogs or tech articles to promote the companies engineering culture, especially for organisations that are not 'traditional' tech firms.

TIL that OKR means "Objectives and Key Results".

Re: McDonalds Event Driven Architecture

#57

Post by bcjordan »

weeniehutjrdev wrote: post #35
keepquestioning wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean discordant

I think both work, but it depends on what they mean?

Wanted to learn more about the difference so asked ChatGPT for a rundown with the context, pretty neat in-depth analysis (assuming it's accurate):

> It's possible that either word could be used in the context you've provided. Both "discordant" and "dissonant" can refer to things that are unpleasant or conflicting, so either word could be used to describe the feeling of seeing a large company using Medium for its technical blog.

> However, there is a subtle difference between the two words. "Dissonant" typically refers to things that are in conflict because of their individual qualities, while "discordant" typically refers to things that are in conflict because of their relationship to each other. In the context of your sentence, "dissonant" might be a slightly better fit because it emphasizes the individual qualities of the company (i.e. its size) and the platform (i.e. Medium) that are in conflict.

Re: McDonalds Event Driven Architecture

#58

Post by bitshiftfaced »

joezydeco wrote: post #3
achrono wrote: post #2

While this satisfies some idle curiosity, I don't really get what justifies spending the resources in posting such stuff. Is this a recruitment tactic somehow for such companies?

I have a hunch that's part of it. I also think they're trying to show that they're as technically competent as Chik-fil-A, who has been doing this for a while now. https://medium.com/chick-fil-atech

I would never had guessed that Chic-fil-A was considered a contender to McDonald's in technical competency. I drive up and a person standing outside takes my order and asks my name. Then I drive up some more and another person asks me my name and punches something into a tablet, and then I drive up some more and get to the window.

This is 2022. Businesses already have queueing software that automatically takes images of the vehicle to match with your order. I get that some customers like having the "human factor," but there's definitely room for improvement.

Re: McDonalds Event Driven Architecture

#60

Post by andy800 »

I am, for better or worse, a "heavy user" of the McDonald's app. And unfortunately, all this architecture somehow still misses so many usability issues. The most annoying one, is that the app always defaults to the closest location "as the bird flies." Despite the fact that I have "favorited" a different store, and also my last 5 or 10 orders were placed at this favorite store, the app ALWAYS defaults to the first store, which may be a tenth of a mile closer but has three additional traffic lights and twice the traffic.

The app is also wildly inaccurate with store open/close times (in both directions -- sometimes it tells you a 24-hour store is "currently closed"), and the in-store employees are often confused how to ring up or serve a mobile order.

But the deals are good. BOGO QPCheese just about every day.

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