The driving need for edge computing is low-latency. There just isn't the need for it in a restaurant.
I do hope they're not doing real-time control of kitchen equipment via something in a container, containers in Linux are nowhere near deterministic enough.
This strikes me as someone who is familiar with only web technologies but unfamiliar with control systems attempting to create a control system.... completely inappropriate tools for the job.
Examples of things we are controlling are timers for food, cameras that can recognize and track food items, drying machines that will automatically trigger and fry fries.
For example I'm guessing it doesn't matter if one of your timers are a second late due to Linux deciding to swap a process out or prioritise some upgrade check but imagine if your time constraints were a lot tighter.
Similarly if you're attempting to track food on a conveyor belt and Linux decides to prioritise the file indexer on your filesystem... oops, a lettuce has been thrown on the floor.
Real-time operating systems exist for a reason.
So far we’ve been satisfied with Linux (Ubuntu 18.04 to be exact) and it’s overall capabilities.
Also, don’t forget that cost at scale is a big factor... doing things perfectly but expensively is not profitable at 2k locations.
Sure, you may be able to tolerate a 1 second 'blip'... how about ten seconds? a minute? do you know for sure how long Linux may put your process on hold for? Linux provides no guarantees at all.
It seems to me that what you are really creating is a traditional control system with web technologies and using the hype-of-the-day (i.e. edge computing) to justify it... with the corresponding increase in overhead and cycles.
This does not seem like a good solution to me, the only novelty here is the inappropriate use of technologies. i.e. you've managed to dig a tunnel with a spoon.
If they can get "good enough" results using Linux and running with technologies that the average developer is more likely to know, is it worth the investment in running a RTOS? Especially given running a RTOS will make any higher level app integration more difficult?
The benefit of running with Linux outweighs the risk of "lettuce on the floor", imo. Yes, there's probably overhead in terms of clock cycles, but there's also probably dramatically less overhead in terms of developer resources.. and when you're running off commodity hardware you can guess which overhead will cost more!
Correctness of the solution is important, otherwise we're just playing at being engineers.
> At some point, you will realise that your job is not to create an idol to the software-engineering gods but rather to have a working product.
> Does this product work? if so, its doing its job.
Something like RTLinux however, would. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RTLinux)
They could be using VeloCloud and many of those internet connectivity problems would go away. Use multiple internet links with cellular along with dynamic multipath packet optimization
Internet connectivity for restaurants stink.
So we put our compute at the edge.
Trust me... as an SRE I would much prefer we shove it in the cloud and call it a day, but alas... no such luck.