Dunno. I've know several business owners that didn't take credit cards until recently, and even then only did so because the newer companies have significantly lowered the investment cost. Maybe you don't consider small family owned restaurants "real".
Seems like there's an opportunity for a cheap 3 node cluster, sold as a value add to businesses and supported a platform that application writers could target. They might well come with a support contract, some basic functionality, and then users could pay for inventory, staff scheduling, point of sales terminal support, integration with food delivery services, etc.
Much like how some home/small business NASs these days have support for 100s of integrations to various online services.
"Cluster" doesn't really square with "small business". Like, why have 3 nodes? HA? They're all probably plugged into the same power run and switch and breathing the same A/C. They're not actually redundant but they are more complicated. So it makes no sense unless you have strangely huge/complicated computational requirements.
Why not? Small business can lose significant money from a few hours of downtime and support that's onsite within an hour is quite expensive.
I'm not thinking cluster for performance, just for HA.
For small business why not 3 x Raspberry Pi to enable as much functionality as possible without network and/or power? A cheap UPS would likely run a few Pi for days. Chick-fil-a (3 NUC in a k8s cluster) seems pretty proud of their setup, why not something similar for any similar size restaurant? 3x Pi for smaller businesses seems like a good fit.
Oh, and a Pi cluster isn't going to need any more AC than a human, even if it's uncomfortable. I have one in my attic and it regularly gets above 110 in the summer, no problems so far.
If the network is out, have the Pi fall over to WAN, this is pretty common these days. Some consumer routers support this (insert a sim car), and it's fairly common for raspberry Pis used for home security to support similar. Handling credit card transactions over WAN is reasonably practical... even falling over to a modem+POTS could do for an emergency.
So between UPS (even UPS + solar + battery would be reasonable for a Pi) and fallover to WAN or modem a 3 way cluster could help keep business up during power outages, storms, earthquakes, fires, and of course node failures.
Question is can the right combination of hardware standardization, software standardization, support, and application store get together to enable chick-fil-a like functionality at a price point acceptable to small businesses?
First of all, do you know what k8s is for? Bin packing. Does your small business have a bin packing problem? (And I don't mean crates) Does your small business even need containers at all?
Second, 3 nodes is more than you need. You only need 2 nodes for HA. There is no universe in which two nodes in the closet of a coffee shop would go down, but three would not.
Third, it's too complicated. It takes teams of people loads of time and money to get it working properly, and then they have to keep supporting it, because release cycles and changing standards, etc. Distributed systems are the most complex and the most costly, unless you're at a huge scale, and then it can be cheaper.
Four, it's unnecessarily expensive, because again, you don't need 3, and it's too complicated.
Five, you don't need 3 nodes to have redundant network paths. A DSL line and a cell modem are pretty easy to plug into one machine.
But six, the real reason this wouldn't work: small businesses do not buy HA.
> Question is can the right combination of hardware standardization, software standardization, support, and application store get together to enable chick-fil-a like functionality at a price point acceptable to small businesses?
Seems like there's an opportunity for a cheap 3 node cluster, sold as a value add to businesses and supported a platform that application writers could target. They might well come with a support contract, some basic functionality, and then users could pay for inventory, staff scheduling, point of sales terminal support, integration with food delivery services, etc.
Much like how some home/small business NASs these days have support for 100s of integrations to various online services.