[danpalmer]

It sounds like a huge cost saving to me. Being able to install a few dumb machines in the restaurant and then have remote installation and management of applications running on them would be great. I imagine that kubernetes would be more reliable than PXE booting images across the internet (as that often requires physically rebooting machines which requires involvement of the restaurant staff, will be error prone, etc), not to mention that building bootable images with your software on is not a very modern practice.

Bear in mind that in terms of cost, this is competing with a person driving to each restaurant and fiddling around with computers for an hour, which is a very expensive process.

[oblio]

> not to mention that building bootable images with your software on is not a very modern practice.

1. Why not?

2. Who cares if it's not modern if it does the job?

And they wouldn't even need to make a special app, they could just make it a webapp ergo make a 1-time image with a browser...

[danpalmer]

> 1. Why not?

It's becoming more common to distribute applications with orchestration software like Kubernetes. The technology around PXE booting is quite old, and mired in enterprise cruft.

> 2. Who cares if it's not modern if it does the job?

Developers love new tech, especially if they can get a Medium post out of it. This doesn't make it a good reason of course, but if this is the tech that more developers are familiar with, that's a good reason.

I personally wouldn't want to learn how to boot 6000 remote machines off built disk images over the internet, I'd rather use the skills I already have around Ansible or learn Kubernetes.

> And they wouldn't even need to make a special app, they could just make it a webapp ergo make a 1-time image with a browser...

I've never been to a Chick-fil-a, but if the setups are anything like my local McDonalds, that's a complex 5 screen setup showing a fluid mix of static images, videos, animations, and applications, not to mention that other stores have different setups/layouts/display types/etc - I don't think you'd be able to _reliably_ do this in a browser. My guess is that it's a multi-screen aware wrapper around video components and web views. That will need re-deploying regularly I would imagine. And that's not to mention the kitchen ordering system, the self-service machines, the tills, etc.

On-site machines totally make sense, smart applications deployed locally, frequently, make sense.