11–20 of 58 posts
But why?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's easy to have a low-effort cynical take about Chick-Fil-A's use of Kubernetes in its restaurants, but the actual post outlining why they chose to provision each restaurant with a 3-node Kubernetes cluster [1] makes a fairly compelling argument. Simply put, they needed to ensure that their point-of-sale terminals had bulletproof reliability, and they wanted to do it in a way that leveraged commodity hardware. The…
Low effort is pointing out just one thing that may or may not even help. This doesn't address the machine learning pieces, 100k sensors per restaurant, fryer sensors, everything else that is listed. It's a chicken sandwich restaurant. How much will all of this really buy over typical weekly/monthly/yearly sales trends? It's not just CFA. I for some reason watched a Taco Bell video on LinkedIn that layed out one small…
Allowing them to batch-make orders from cars that would otherwise have to wait for someone else to get their food to place the order.
Not having to have the stores talk to a remote server to record an order during peak load could be a win. Not sure if it justifies "edge computing" but if a fast food restaurant needed it, it'd be them. I've never seen anything like that level of congestion at McDonalds or Taco Bell.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Low effort is pointing out just one thing that may or may not even help. This doesn't address the machine learning pieces, 100k sensors per restaurant, fryer sensors, everything else that is listed. It's a chicken sandwich restaurant. How much will all of this really buy over typical weekly/monthly/yearly sales trends? It's not just CFA. I for some reason watched a Taco Bell video on LinkedIn that layed out one small…
I don't know how Chikfilas are near you, but with the ones I've been to there are often lines of cars wrapping around the building a couple times. And when that happens, there are several Chikfila employees walking car-to-car with tablets, pre-emptively taking and charging orders from customers. Allowing them to batch-make orders from cars that would otherwise have to wait for someone else to get their food to place…
I think CFA has a cult following, due to politeness and quality. In all my rambling, I guess my point is that CFA could go back to pen and paper, non electric cash only cash registers, and still probably not miss a beat.
Given that we both know there will always be a line blocking the highway, every day but Sunday, what do all the sensors, machine learning, etc really enable? I guess I'm just asking for a bit of pragmatism, even where it obviously isn't my place to say so.
> (Previous article) Our hypothesis: By making smarter kitchen equipment we can collect more data. By applying data to our restaurant, we can build more intelligent systems. By building more intelligent systems, we can better scale our business.
I must admit, from an outsiders perspective, it really sounds like a bunch of buzzwords justifying a solution in search of a problem. Their examples of forecasting waffle fries reminds me of a failed startup that forecasted how many checkout lines to open via computer vision (which I can't find on Google). In the end, it turned out it was a lot easier for a human manager to simply open a new line when required, and the computer vision provided the wrong forecasting to be accurate. I wonder what CFAs success criteria and metrics are for this project.
Tech-wise, wouldn't it be a lot simpler to do a single node, single application that gets updated via something like RAUC? Especially if you have a small team (which they emphasized), it seems to me like adding a Kubernetes cluster at the edge adds complication without much benefit, other than "redundancy" (how redundant is a single rack with the same power source anyways?). Also, how would they get an important security update to the host, if it becomes necessary?
It's a lot of nitpicks, but the project overall is very cool. Sounds like they solved a lot of hard tech problems and executed well on the ops.
But why?
They're basically the mob of the fast food industry. They only want $10k from you to start your franchise; they cover all the costs of starting the business. The tradeoff they have the highest percentage take of any franchise.
But why?
The 486 based PC had a mix of grease and lint/dust on every possible surface including the power supply fan, all cabling and the entirety of the motherboard. It had been placed on a shelf near one of the deep fryers and had run without problems for years. Certainly the other end of the 'long tail' of computing!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know how Chikfilas are near you, but with the ones I've been to there are often lines of cars wrapping around the building a couple times. And when that happens, there are several Chikfila employees walking car-to-car with tablets, pre-emptively taking and charging orders from customers. Allowing them to batch-make orders from cars that would otherwise have to wait for someone else to get their food to place…
Yep, same. Actually, same everywhere I've ever lived in the US, come to think of it. I think CFA has a cult following, due to politeness and quality. In all my rambling, I guess my point is that CFA could go back to pen and paper, non electric cash only cash registers, and still probably not miss a beat. Given that we both know there will always be a line blocking the highway, every day but Sunday, what do all the se…