Chick-fil-A Tech Blog

It's awesome. Lots of cool things going on [0], great work life balance, competitive pay, great people. If you want to know more just email me (in bio). [0] https://medium.com/@cfatechblog

It's great for edge computing. Chick-fil-a is using something like this at all their restaurants. https://medium.com/@cfatechblog/bare-metal-k8s-clustering-at-chick-fil… https://medium.com/@cfatechblog/edge-computing-at-chick-fil-a-7d672426…

Azure Stack and AWS Outposts are already targeting at least mid-size businesses. The issue that they are still not simple to implement and give marginal benefits to most use cases. I never actually managed to get one of these onboard, but we did evaluate them on behalf of some clients who were to trying to some very high-end digital experiences for customers. Geofencing, personalized kiosk experiences, dwell time tracking. And they wanted it all to be really fast. We did some pricing (for both our services and equipment/hosting costs) and it would have been millions and taken at least 6 months to build out. I also worked at a pretty big retailer that had some some ancient "edge" compute workloads that we were in the process of decommissioning because it was too big of a pain to keep them updated, powered and connected at 300 locations. Chik-Fil-A has a great write up of how they run K8s on racks in every restaurant: https://medium.com/@cfatechblog/edge-computing-at-chick-fil-a-7d672426… Typical small businesses don't have the resources of needs to do any of that. They are already far more likely to invest in turnkey technology like Salesforce, Square, etc than provision anything at all in the cloud on their own.

How the U.S. Air Force Deployed Kubernetes and Istio on an F-16 in 45 days https://thenewstack.io/how-the-u-s-air-force-deployed-kubernetes-and-i… Bare Metal K8s Clustering at Chick-fil-A Scale https://medium.com/@cfatechblog/bare-metal-k8s-clustering-at-chick-fil… 2c

I've seen a couple presentations by Chick-fil-a explaining things they've encountered doing this. You can find them on youtube, and here is an article: https://medium.com/@cfatechblog/bare-metal-k8s-clustering-at-chick-fil…

Meanwhile, Chick-fil-a is running Kubernetes at the edge for equipment, POS telemetry, and ML. https://medium.com/@cfatechblog/bare-metal-k8s-clustering-at-chick-fil…

Chick-fil-a actually has been running kubernetes at all their stores for a few years. https://medium.com/@cfatechblog/bare-metal-k8s-clustering-at-chick-fil…

Not too surprising from the company that deploys kubernetes to every local restaurant. :) https://medium.com/@cfatechblog/bare-metal-k8s-clustering-at-chick-fil… Their own equipment engineering is also impressive, based on a high school classmate’s work there in Atlanta.

Fun fact, related to the fact that Chick Fil-A handles much more of the operations than a normal fast food chain: they apparently run Kubernetes on the machines in a store (https://medium.com/@cfatechblog/bare-metal-k8s-clustering-at-chick-fil…

And when Chick-Fil-A say they provide IT, it’s far far more than you might think! https://medium.com/@cfatechblog/bare-metal-k8s-clustering-at-chick-fil… https://medium.com/@cfatechblog/edge-ai-in-a-smarter-chick-fil-a-6e56f…

You'd probably be surprised. Kubernetes is a hot enough buzzword that even companies as bizarre as Chick-fil-A are getting on board, with a hilarious architecture. https://medium.com/@cfatechblog/bare-metal-k8s-clustering-at-chick-fil… Edit: Way past the getting-on-board stage, apparently. It had slipped my mind that the article I linked is from 18 months ago and already described an extensive rollout.

Related, there was a really interesting article going around a few days back, on how Chick-fil-A provisions bare-metal K8s clusters to every single remote branch. Not all the innovation is happening in the FAANGs https://medium.com/@cfatechblog/bare-metal-k8s-clustering-at-chick-fil…

I work at Red Hat and am involved with edge technologies, while if you look at it in a generalized way, sure, it seems like "huh, it's client server with lots of clients" but it does really refer to novel new architectures being deployed by customers where there are more computing resources out in the field than would normally be present. more simply, Chick-Fil-A's post about their edge efforts really made it clear for me when the term first came out - a miniature datacenter in every store. this is definitely novel: https://medium.com/@cfatechblog/edge-computing-at-chick-fil-a-7d672426…

This sounds like Chick-fil-A's use case where they decided to put a k8s cluster in each restaurant. https://medium.com/@cfatechblog/edge-computing-at-chick-fil-a-7d672426… https://medium.com/@cfatechblog/bare-metal-k8s-clustering-at-chick-fil… If you have a single node not a cluster in each location then k8s buys you a lot less. Some people still advocate single-node k8s "clusters" for benefits like rolling deployment.

https://medium.com/@cfatechblog/bare-metal-k8s-clustering-at-chick-fil… Of all things, the Chik-fil-A tech blog gives a pretty good explanation of why you might want this.

Yes, this is what's exciting to me about K3s. This is a business opportunity for Consultants. There are big companies already paying good money to implement LoFi clusters at scale https://medium.com/@cfatechblog/bare-metal-k8s-clustering-at-chick-fil…

Somewhat unrelated: Chik-fil-a has a pretty fascinating engineering blog[1] that describes an interesting tech stack and engineering philosophy in an industry that you wouldn't expect. 1: https://medium.com/@cfatechblog

One of the more interesting use cases I have read in recent memory: Chick-fil-A used it to set up a bare metal edge compute network between all it's restaurants The how: https://medium.com/@cfatechblog/bare-metal-k8s-clustering-at-chick-fil… The why: https://medium.com/@cfatechblog/edge-computing-at-chick-fil-a-7d672426…

If you want to see the actual hardware used at the restaurant, check out the previous blog post: https://medium.com/@cfatechblog/bare-metal-k8s-clustering-at-chick-fil… Spoiler: It's a stack of Intel NUCs.