They made a comment about having some kind of IoT infrastructure in each restaurant.

It absolutely smells of over-engineering, though. There are a lot easier ways of pushing software out than maintaining k8s locally; and they're almost certainly going to need to build a system which manages and monitors all these clusters...

We deal with a challenge of frequent network outages or latency issues... keep in mind that we have locations out in the middle of nowhere with no QoS. There are a variety of loads at the restaurant that require low latency and high up time. On site K8s clusters were a natural fit for that solution.

Trust me, it would have been way easier to just hook this stuff up to the cloud :-P . I still dream that we will be able to some day.

Plenty of large chains have had IoT like systems since the 90s or earlier. Everything in the kitchen runs on presets.

I saw them talk at QCon and asked them that question. They are not running PoS through this system. They are instead using it to manage all of the devices in their restaurants (from kitchen hardware like automated fridges/fryers/IoT stuff to order tracking, building temperature control, and metrics tracking).

Just looked up the terms Chick-fil-A and QCon and found the talk you are referring to. For those who are curious why a restaurant chain would engineer solutions such as this, perhaps this will be interesting.

https://www.infoq.com/news/2017/07/iot-edge-compute-chick-fi...

Another idea: Maybe they want the restaurant software to continue running locally if it is offline, but they want to sync data while online.

This would make a lot of sense with something like CockroachDB - if the restaurant was offline, their local data would be preserved. But, as soon as it goes back online, then corporate would have access to all of the data.

Why not restaurants run web apps on commodity hardware like iPads. But I guess you are dependent on the internet being up.