Chick Fil A's Edge Enterprise Architecture

The previous article linked in the post goes more into the "Why"

https://medium.com/chick-fil-atech/enterprise-restaurant-com...

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 solution they came up with, Kubernetes clusters running on consumer-grade Intel NUCs is a fairly elegant solution to that problem. It reminds me of how Google chose to run on "commodity" Intel servers, rather than "enterprise-grade" hardware from IBM or Sun, realizing that, at scale, failure is guaranteed, no matter how overdesigned your hardware is, and it's more important to design for redundancy, easy provisioning and replacement than it is to design for absolute uptime. Chick-Fil-A has come to a similar realization for their point of sale systems.

[1]: https://medium.com/chick-fil-atech/edge-computing-at-chick-f...

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 problem regarding the ability to accept orders, and how a -completely- new k8s microservice architecture addressed it. This smells a lot of the same, mixed in with more tech overoptimism. GE had the same spiels 10 years ago, with better use cases, and realized most of it was a dead end.

When I was at Walmart the holy grail was edge compute in every store (which I think is now live). There is a mainframe in each store that powers point-of-sale, inventory, etc. But in terms of building modern apps, you couldn't assume 24/7 local connectivity was a thing or that it would be fast enough for what you wanted to do.

Making each location its own failure domain was also a huge win. Imagine a cloud outage taking out hundreds of stores.