Hey this is Brian and I wrote the article. Great question.
1) MQTT -- we have a lot of cases where we want to share data between physical or "software" devices in-restaurant, without internet connections. MQTT is our primary channel for sharing messages between things, and for collecting data in general to be exfiltrated to the cloud.
2) "Brain" apps -- these are "smart" applications that collect data from MQTT topics and make decisions about what should be done for a given restaurant process. Today, the reality is we do not automatically cook anything. We do, however, have some restaurants that have more intelligent screens to help them know what to cook at any given moment based off of forecasting models that use the data we collect from many different things. These generally run at the edge to preserve their function in cases where there is high latency or bad WAN connections.
3) In the past we had a POS Server in the restaurant. It was a single point of failure for things like drive thru order taking with iPads and mobile orders. The move to K8s lets us run a microservice that can intake mobile orders on a more resilient infrastructure. To be clear, we have not made this shift just yet, but its something we are working on that will ultimately be transparent to customers but that will make their ordering experience more reliable. We have many cases like this.
Overall, our workloads aren't "heavy" which is why we did an array of three moderately sized commodity compute devices. We wanted a smart, sensible ROI on the hardware. We do have enough business-important apps that need to run in a low-latency high-availability environment to push us out of just cloud (internet dependent) and to the Edge. In the future, maybe this can change and we can use cloud only. It seems Edge is an industry trend though, with many workloads moving towards their consumers (a lot of gaming, but a lot of retail as well).
Great question and I hope this helped -- if not just let me know.
Good answer, seems we finally got to the meat of the product (no pun intended).
So the current workload doesn't do any of the fancy stuff but is just typical POS stuff with a 'smart' display for orders driven by a process monitoring a few MQTT sources.
You've just put in enough beef to allow for future expansion.
I can honestly say that answer provides more information than the whole original article.
1) MQTT -- we have a lot of cases where we want to share data between physical or "software" devices in-restaurant, without internet connections. MQTT is our primary channel for sharing messages between things, and for collecting data in general to be exfiltrated to the cloud.
2) "Brain" apps -- these are "smart" applications that collect data from MQTT topics and make decisions about what should be done for a given restaurant process. Today, the reality is we do not automatically cook anything. We do, however, have some restaurants that have more intelligent screens to help them know what to cook at any given moment based off of forecasting models that use the data we collect from many different things. These generally run at the edge to preserve their function in cases where there is high latency or bad WAN connections.
3) In the past we had a POS Server in the restaurant. It was a single point of failure for things like drive thru order taking with iPads and mobile orders. The move to K8s lets us run a microservice that can intake mobile orders on a more resilient infrastructure. To be clear, we have not made this shift just yet, but its something we are working on that will ultimately be transparent to customers but that will make their ordering experience more reliable. We have many cases like this.
Overall, our workloads aren't "heavy" which is why we did an array of three moderately sized commodity compute devices. We wanted a smart, sensible ROI on the hardware. We do have enough business-important apps that need to run in a low-latency high-availability environment to push us out of just cloud (internet dependent) and to the Edge. In the future, maybe this can change and we can use cloud only. It seems Edge is an industry trend though, with many workloads moving towards their consumers (a lot of gaming, but a lot of retail as well).
Great question and I hope this helped -- if not just let me know.