Chick-fil-A's engineering team writes about running Kubernetes, edge computing, SRE and networking across its restaurants.
HN commenters cite its bare metal Kubernetes and edge computing posts as real-world examples of running clusters at each restaurant, and praise the team as a workplace.
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-7d67242675e2
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.
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-7d67242675e2
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-7d67242675e2
https://medium.com/@cfatechblog/bare-metal-k8s-clustering-at-chick-fil-a-scale-7b0607bd3541
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.
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-a-scale-7b0607bd3541
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.
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-a-scale-7b0607bd3541
The why: https://medium.com/@cfatechblog/edge-computing-at-chick-fil-a-7d67242675e2
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-istio-on-an-f-16-in-45-days/
Bare Metal K8s Clustering at Chick-fil-A Scale
https://medium.com/@cfatechblog/bare-metal-k8s-clustering-at-chick-fil-a-scale-7b0607bd3541
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