Edge Computing at Chick-fil-A

#News(IoTStack) [ via IoTForIndiaGroup ]

Why does a restaurant company like Chick-fil-A want to deploy Kubernetes at the Edge? What are the goals? That, we can answer.
• Low-latency, internet-independent applications that can reliably run our business
• High availability for these applications
• Platform that enables rapid innovation and that allows delivery of business functionality to production as quickly as possible
• Horizontal scale — infrastructure and application development teams
As a simple example, image a forecasting model that attempts to predict how many Waffle Fries (or replace with your favorite Chick-fil-A product) should be cooked over every minute of the day. The forecast is created by an analytics process running in the cloud that uses transaction-level sales data from many restaurants. This forecast can most certainly be produced with a little work. Unfortunately, it is not accurate enough to actually drive food production. Sales in Chick-fil-A restaurants are prone to many traffic spikes and are significantly affected by local events (traffic, sports, weather, etc.).

However, if we were to collect data from our point-of-sale system’s keystrokes in real-time to understand current demand, add data from the fryers about work in progress inventory, and then micro-adjust the initial forecast in-restaurant, we would be able to get a much more accurate picture of what we should cook at any given moment. This data can then be used to give a much more intelligent display to a restaurant team member that is responsible for cooking fries (for example), or perhaps to drive cooking automation in the future.
Goals like this led us to develop an Internet of Things (IOT) platform for our restaurants. To successfully scale our business we need the ability to 1) collect data and 2) use it to drive automation in the restaurant

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