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Chick Fil A's Edge Enterprise Architecture

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Re: Chick Fil A's Edge Enterprise Architecture

#21

Post by edgyquant »

silisili wrote: post #7
quanticle wrote: post #5

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…

Other restaurants could use some of the ML stuff. Starbucks for instance. I go there all the time ordered an iced mocha and 1 out of every 5-10 times I get a white mocha and they have to remake it. That’s 7$ they lose out even if it was all profit. This could be easily fixed with a camera and a ML model that ensures the drink is the right order.

Re: Chick Fil A's Edge Enterprise Architecture

#22

Post by KennyBlanken »

silisili wrote: post #7
quanticle wrote: post #5

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…

Dual redundant internet(!), the wifi gear to reliably support that many devices, the cost of more expensive equipment, the added cost of support contracts to keep those fancy sensors working, especially since in a lot of locations they're probably the only food service place using them.

...and then the infrastructure of running the cloud services to support things like every restaurant's K8 cluster hitting a git server constantly throughout a day.

...and then there's the overhead of three separate dev ops teams.

etc.

Re: Chick Fil A's Edge Enterprise Architecture

#23

Post by FooHentai »

billllll wrote: post #15

> The goal of the Restaurant Edge Compute platform was to create a robust platform in each restaurant where our DevOps Product teams could deploy and manage applications to help Operators and Team Members keep pace with ever-growing business, whether in the kitchen, the supply chain, or in directly serving customers. > (Previous article) Our hypothesis: By making smarter kitchen equipment we can collect more data. By…

Fundamentally what they've deployed here is something a lot of organisations struggle with or don't even recognize as worth having - A reliable edge which you can trust sufficiently to form the functional core of a site.

For a restaurant chain this is something worth putting the development effort into because once you've figured it out and ran it for a few years to demonstrate it's reliability you can pitch the shift from a network-optional edge at each site to a network-dependent site with intelligent components hanging off it and depending on it. That's a pathway to having a major competitive advantage in the medium term that your competitors won't be able to put into place overnight once they realize you've left them behind.

You can't get there with the amount of effort often put into untrusted edge sites like this - aka a pc in a cupboard. You also can't get there with cloud when the weakest element in the chain is unrealiable site connectivity.

They could have done it in a lot of different ways, but going with cheap commodity hardware and avoiding expensive cluster license nonsense (vSphere etc) were smart choices. Spend that money on a compenent centralized tech team rather than vendor shinyness, and you can do a hell of a lot more (and often move faster, to boot).

Re: Chick Fil A's Edge Enterprise Architecture

#24

Post by quanticle »

silisili wrote: post #14
llanowarelves wrote: post #13

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…

Yeah, but on the other hand, just a few days ago, I went into a Potbelly and had to leave because the point of sale system was "rebooting", and they could neither process credit cards nor even get the cash drawer open to handle sales the old fashioned way. Pretty much everyone in line behind me left too once they realized what was going on. Maybe if they'd had a Kubernetes cluster keeping their local systems online, they wouldn't have missed out on a busy lunch rush.

Re: Chick Fil A's Edge Enterprise Architecture

#25

Post by zzzeek »

silisili wrote: post #14
llanowarelves wrote: post #13

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…

It sounds like you are skeptical that computers and automation may be useful to streamline and make more efficient what is otherwise a tedious, manual process with many logistical elements.

Re: Chick Fil A's Edge Enterprise Architecture

#26

Post by quanticle »

KennyBlanken wrote: post #22
silisili wrote: post #7

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…

Dual redundant internet(!), the wifi gear to reliably support that many devices, the cost of more expensive equipment, the added cost of support contracts to keep those fancy sensors working, especially since in a lot of locations they're probably the only food service place using them. ...and then the infrastructure of running the cloud services to support things like every restaurant's K8 cluster hitting a git serv…

See my other comment [1] re: my experience at Potbelly. Restaurant usage is extremely bursty. For a lot of restaurants in business-y areas, you basically have a single spike of traffic from roughly 11:30 to 13:30 that drives >90% of the day's sales. You miss that, and you may as well write off the entire day's revenue. Investing in the redundancy (two internet connections, three servers, etc) to ensure that the point-of-sale system is online for that spike can be worth it, even for a relatively low-margin business. In fact, it might be more important for a low-margin business given the ephemeral nature of restaurant sales. It's not like e.g. Amazon, where if you're down for a few hours it doesn't matter, because customers will wait to buy their knick-knacks. If you're down for a lunch rush, you've lost that day's sales forever. After all, it's not as if customers are going to stay hungry and come back and buy two sandwiches tomorrow. They'll just go somewhere else for lunch.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34350556

Re: Chick Fil A's Edge Enterprise Architecture

#27

Post by decremental »

almost_usual wrote: post #12

Year 2023, FAA systems fail nationwide due to a “corrupt file” and Chick Fil A is highly redundant with a Kubernetes cluster running every store.

The private sector will almost always be more efficient than the public sector, but that said, the last time that system in question was in the news it was because it had been given a more "inclusive" name. It speaks to the priorities of the regime.
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