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.

HA design for stores is interesting. You want the store to stay up (dispensing goods and accepting payments generally, additionally preparing food in this case) as much as possible. At the same time you want a solution that is cheap to deploy and maintain.

Making everything in the store a dumb client is cheap and easy, but also fragile. Doing as much computing in each store (and even on each POS) as possible is great for HA but now you have more complicated hardware and software deployment problems. Different merchants trade these off in different ways.

CFA seem to have gone for a lot of computing in the store, and the rest of the design is about mitigating those deployment and maintenance problems and costs. I like the NUC cluster, Gitops, API and support team stories. Am less keen on the K3S deployment per store, seems like a questionable choice of orchestration engine for this scenario but maybe there are details of rest of their store architecture that I'm missing.

I remember 10 years ago when my friend asked me to go look at his restaurant client's computer and diagnose/fix if possible.

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!

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

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

It sound a lot better than what we had when I worked at a fastfood restaurant: every location remote desktoping to some overloaded server in the regional office, so simple things like printing an inventory list would involve a lot of waiting.

Why do all the tech? The goal is to have the ultimate model of just-in-time manufacturing: to never run out of supplies and, without sounding creepy, to know precisely what the customer plans to order and have it in a bag in and in their hands the moment they arrive at the store.

There are upstream benefits for marketing to see the feedback of their campaigns in real-time, but this is mostly about keeping inventories low and service times lower. That equates directly to profit.

CFA isn't the only chain working on this, but they're the most open about how they're implementing the infrastructure.

Justifying the most expensive franchise 'take' of any chain in the nation, apparently.

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.