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McDonald's absolutely does need global data centers. Even now the kiosks are frustratingly slow here in Europe, can't imagine what a round-trip to US servers wo

McDonald's absolutely does need global data centers. Even now the kiosks are frustratingly slow here in Europe, can't imagine what a round-trip to US servers would do. My siblings work there and their work information system is not so bad but definitely it'd be totally frustrating if it didn't run on AWS in EU.

justsomehnguy 3y ago
If McD do need a global data centers to show the menu in the kiosks then they should fire their whole IT dept and start from scratch. There is absolutely zero reason for a kiosk to touch 'a global data center'. No, not even for a payment, because it's just asks the payment terminal if the payment succeeded or not.
- throwaway11460 3y ago
  I absolutely disagree. The restaurant managers really shouldn't need to manage servers too. They get the kiosk as a service that they don't need to care about and that is correct. So McDonald's should be dispatching kiosk admins all around the world? That's very much not eco friendly. And of course, expensive... And a total nightmare to manage. K8s and AWS is a night walk through the rose garden compared to that. > No, not even for a payment, because it's just asks the payment terminal if the payment succeeded or not. Yeah sure, works great as long as the kiosk doesn't crash during the payment.
  - justsomehnguy 3y ago
    > The restaurant managers really shouldn't need to manage servers too. And they don't. Why the hell do you pull this nonsense? In case you don't know (looks like you don't) these are Windows machines[0]. Any Windows machine is capable running IIS or even Apache on it. No need for the servers for managers to manage. Just effing serve it locally, if you can't provide each McD with a mini box what is managed by the central IT. > should be dispatching kiosk admins all around the world LOL > K8s and AWS is a night walk through the rose garden compared to that. You need a sysadmin to teach you how to build robust and resilient local applications and services without being Eco-unfriendly and without racking billions in AWS bills. > Yeah sure, works great as long as the kiosk doesn't crash during the payment. Do you understand what it is the payment terminal which is processing the payment and you can't offload reading CC/NFC to the 'cloud'? And finally, there is already 'IT' infrastructure in each McD: Ethernet switches, UPSes, wireless AP and maybe a controller, menu and order screens at the counter, networked PoS and whatever else. If you claim what restaurant managers manage all these then you don't really know anything about nor retail nor IT. Or just bickering in a bad faith. [0] and if in your case they are Linux ones... do I even need to continue?
    - throwaway11460 3y ago
      What sys admin? They don't have any. The kiosks are entirely blackboxes managed from the US central. It works if it has a working network. The store manager can manage it from their iPad lying down on a beach. The card terminals send data directly to a bank and it doesn't matter whether the box burns down while it crashes, the payment is recorded. I built similar kind of self service box (self checkout) for a local store chain. I know the problem well. Main problems are costs, system administration and management. Our solution is just a simple Chrome kiosk mode browser window too. It's a smart solution. We run it on AWS because no reason not to - simply pushing the SPA to S3 behind Cloudfront beats any other kind of deployment/hosting method. Some backend stuff runs in Lambda, some runs in ECS containers. All data in a managed RDS DB. Easy to use, easy to maintain, easy to upgrade, easy to deploy, easy to scale from 0 to several thousands kiosks... I used to be a Windows admin (though admittedly the last Windows I managed was 2003 R2). Just the word IIS makes my neck hair stand up. Especially if it should be holding payment data... Huh, damn. Wow. You'd need sync to a global service anyways - it's a multi store chain. Your suggestion just makes everything harder and more convoluted - and it's just wrong, the payment terminal has its own network connection and doesn't need the kiosk to work at all. The kiosk just initiates the payment but the rest of it is handled out of it - and the kiosk waits for central service to confirm the payment. It's bullshit to connect the kiosk to the bank, we support many banks and keep adding support for more, and what if it's stolen, should we always be ready to rotate the certs on 1000s devices - the bank doesn't have appropriate api, so it's either that or again, a central service? Nah, we just turn it off in our admin panel. I also used to be a Linux sys admin way before clouds. I built one of the first cloud services in my country to solve the problems of that. The company ultimately was out competed - but not by traditional hosting. By the big public clouds. Apparently the problems are real. BTW coincidentally I'm just about to launch a new cloud platform. Nothing fancy really, but it's built on dedicated servers for performance. Last 3 weeks I spent working on stuff I could've done with 100 lines of Terraform/Pulumi with AWS. Maybe a proper sys admin like you could teach me? I am not happy with it at all, it's a major headache and I'm considering a hybrid setup because I just don't want to lose sleep over customer data and site availability.
- cangeroo 3y ago
  You're absolutely right. The only motivation would be latency, but you could have specialized services that run at the edge, if that's so important, for example if payment verification should take 500ms instead of 3000ms. But you could also just rewrite the protocol to have less back-and-forth sequential data exchange, which is a smarter approach.
kortilla 3y ago
If their kiosks need to talk to a server, they fucked it up. This is the problem with idiot cloud architects.

justsomehnguy 3y ago

If McD do need a global data centers to show the menu in the kiosks then they should fire their whole IT dept and start from scratch. There is absolutely zero reason for a kiosk to touch 'a global data center'. No, not even for a payment, because it's just asks the payment terminal if the payment succeeded or not.

throwaway11460 3y ago
I absolutely disagree. The restaurant managers really shouldn't need to manage servers too. They get the kiosk as a service that they don't need to care about and that is correct. So McDonald's should be dispatching kiosk admins all around the world? That's very much not eco friendly. And of course, expensive... And a total nightmare to manage. K8s and AWS is a night walk through the rose garden compared to that. > No, not even for a payment, because it's just asks the payment terminal if the payment succeeded or not. Yeah sure, works great as long as the kiosk doesn't crash during the payment.
- justsomehnguy 3y ago
  > The restaurant managers really shouldn't need to manage servers too. And they don't. Why the hell do you pull this nonsense? In case you don't know (looks like you don't) these are Windows machines[0]. Any Windows machine is capable running IIS or even Apache on it. No need for the servers for managers to manage. Just effing serve it locally, if you can't provide each McD with a mini box what is managed by the central IT. > should be dispatching kiosk admins all around the world LOL > K8s and AWS is a night walk through the rose garden compared to that. You need a sysadmin to teach you how to build robust and resilient local applications and services without being Eco-unfriendly and without racking billions in AWS bills. > Yeah sure, works great as long as the kiosk doesn't crash during the payment. Do you understand what it is the payment terminal which is processing the payment and you can't offload reading CC/NFC to the 'cloud'? And finally, there is already 'IT' infrastructure in each McD: Ethernet switches, UPSes, wireless AP and maybe a controller, menu and order screens at the counter, networked PoS and whatever else. If you claim what restaurant managers manage all these then you don't really know anything about nor retail nor IT. Or just bickering in a bad faith. [0] and if in your case they are Linux ones... do I even need to continue?
  - throwaway11460 3y ago
    What sys admin? They don't have any. The kiosks are entirely blackboxes managed from the US central. It works if it has a working network. The store manager can manage it from their iPad lying down on a beach. The card terminals send data directly to a bank and it doesn't matter whether the box burns down while it crashes, the payment is recorded. I built similar kind of self service box (self checkout) for a local store chain. I know the problem well. Main problems are costs, system administration and management. Our solution is just a simple Chrome kiosk mode browser window too. It's a smart solution. We run it on AWS because no reason not to - simply pushing the SPA to S3 behind Cloudfront beats any other kind of deployment/hosting method. Some backend stuff runs in Lambda, some runs in ECS containers. All data in a managed RDS DB. Easy to use, easy to maintain, easy to upgrade, easy to deploy, easy to scale from 0 to several thousands kiosks... I used to be a Windows admin (though admittedly the last Windows I managed was 2003 R2). Just the word IIS makes my neck hair stand up. Especially if it should be holding payment data... Huh, damn. Wow. You'd need sync to a global service anyways - it's a multi store chain. Your suggestion just makes everything harder and more convoluted - and it's just wrong, the payment terminal has its own network connection and doesn't need the kiosk to work at all. The kiosk just initiates the payment but the rest of it is handled out of it - and the kiosk waits for central service to confirm the payment. It's bullshit to connect the kiosk to the bank, we support many banks and keep adding support for more, and what if it's stolen, should we always be ready to rotate the certs on 1000s devices - the bank doesn't have appropriate api, so it's either that or again, a central service? Nah, we just turn it off in our admin panel. I also used to be a Linux sys admin way before clouds. I built one of the first cloud services in my country to solve the problems of that. The company ultimately was out competed - but not by traditional hosting. By the big public clouds. Apparently the problems are real. BTW coincidentally I'm just about to launch a new cloud platform. Nothing fancy really, but it's built on dedicated servers for performance. Last 3 weeks I spent working on stuff I could've done with 100 lines of Terraform/Pulumi with AWS. Maybe a proper sys admin like you could teach me? I am not happy with it at all, it's a major headache and I'm considering a hybrid setup because I just don't want to lose sleep over customer data and site availability.
cangeroo 3y ago
You're absolutely right. The only motivation would be latency, but you could have specialized services that run at the edge, if that's so important, for example if payment verification should take 500ms instead of 3000ms. But you could also just rewrite the protocol to have less back-and-forth sequential data exchange, which is a smarter approach.

kortilla 3y ago

If their kiosks need to talk to a server, they fucked it up. This is the problem with idiot cloud architects.