Imagine you're a product manager at McDonald's. For the point-of-sale kiosks, you can build the server component for deployment in the cloud, or you can build it for on-prem and add the overhead of physical deployments across tens of thousands of retail locations, plus maintaining them, plus dealing with franchisees.
You do a cost-benefit analysis of potential downtime from internet outages, and based on internet reliability numbers in the markets you serve (plus an uptime estimate from your devops org), you conclude the occasional outage is worth the trade-off.
- printed, static QR code: customer scans it with their payment app and enters the amount
- have an NFC enabled phone that receives payments (most android devices can)
- use the “knuckle busters”: the old school way of imprinting the card number on paper
- NFC enabled device like the one on buses in some cities, synced only at the end of the day
- receive money via one of the marketplace apps: UberEat, Doordash, Grab
- customer browses and pays the company’s online shop in the store instead (this us what Decathlon did once it had a similar outage)
- what else?
I’m quite curious why McDonald’s apparently decided to have no fallback at all. They surely have thought about it. Is the efficiency loss too high? Fraud risk? Training costs?
If the db goes down, make a bunch of copies of that paper, disseminate them, and keep running. worst case is planes don't run at 100% capacity. Just do the best you can to keep the next few legs going without the mothership telling you what to do. Shouldn't be that hard. I know one of the biggest constraints is that crew members run out of fly-able hours. So print that in the backup too: X pilot has Y hours left after HH::MM zulu time. Maybe lobby FAA to allow pilots to fly a few hr past their maximum a few times a year only if the scheduler goes down. I just dont accept that these billion-dollar networks should be this susceptible to disruption given the current state of tech.
This is also how airlines used to work when it comes to collecting payments
There are some upsides to corps downsides...
More discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39713270
