Containers for non-techies (part 2)

Living in the container age

This is a follow to the exciting world of containers and how we got here, you can find part one of this story here.

Make the kitchen great again! (development environments)

Sometimes in such high-end Restaurants you need to test not only one dish, but you want to test how the dish you are developing sits in the complete full course meal.

Full course meal (or development environment)

This meal consists of several dishes which are served to the customer in a specific order, they must be harmonious with each other not only in flavour but also in temperature and texture. In the past, the Chef developing the new dish would need to wait for all the other Chefs in the kitchen to create samples of their own dishes, and arrange a table with the full meal to test how their new development would fit in the meal. Of course they had just a limited number of test tables. Chefs waiting for other Chefs to test the full course meal was time consuming, frustrating and expensive, not to mention one could accidentally test their prototype dish against other prototypes and not the official full course meal.

Now with the Tupperware containers it it possible for a single Chef to instantly create complete full course meals and be able test the progress of the dish they are currently working on against exactly what is currently being served at the Restaurants.

Keeping customers happy (Orchestration)

Remember that weird law where you had to move out of the building every few years? Well, in order to serve the growing customer base, the Chef has decided that each location should have more than one restaurant next to each other: They will all have a common dining room and serve different types of dishes, so one might be doing Pad Thai, Steak Bernoise, but not really Lasagne. And the other Restaurants might have Lasagne but not Pad Thai.

Now people before entering the Restaurant need to place the order to a Maître d’hôtel, who will direct them to the correct building where their desired dish is currently being served.

In case a building is declared non-usable by the city, the Maître d’hôtel can quickly inform the other Restaurant buildings to start serving the dishes that are currently not served, and ensure that all dishes available at all times.

But the Maître d’hôtel is something really special, she will always periodically look at the presentation of the dish, as well as caring that it is served at just the correct temperature. In case a dish not following his strict requirements, she will ask for a new dish to be created from the Tupperware container in the Kitchen.

She will also take care that the restaurant selected for serving dishes has enough plates and the correct cutlery for serving them.

Say the Chef now wants to offer Escargot de Bourgogne, the Maître d’hôtel will only make this dish available at Restaurants that have right cutlery to serve it, you would not serve Escargot de Bourgogne with fork and knife only… we are not savages, are we?

Escargot de Bourgogne with PROPER cutlery

Some things are still complicated

How to do the billing? (Shipping logs)

So this new world of magical Tupperware containers sounds so perfect, but it isn’t it all magical. Some things are still complicated, for example think of the billing, even though a same physical building is selling different dishes, each dish served might belong to a different restaurant, the Lasagne to the Italian restaurant, the Pad Thai to the eh… Thai restaurant. Doing the accounting for a single restaurant would require aggregating all of the billing per dish across all buildings in all regions. So you need to have a reliable method for

Cellars (storage)

There is also the problem of shared storage, in this kind of restaurant with such a dynamic menu you want to serve always the best wine (even by the cup) to pair it with your dishes. But the wine does not come with the food inside the container. You must have a wine cellar, and since you want all the restaurants to serve exactly the same wine a really complicated network of pneumatic tubes was built to serve all restaurants and hook up new ones when the were built.

That’ll do.

Having this shared storage that is easily reachable for all locations is very difficult to get right.

This is not our business (cloud)

One still standing problem was the problem of the Buildings which you had to move out every few years and build new ones, not only that… but managing warehouses, delivering things at the right time from the central storage, scouting land for going into new territories. This whole Infrastructure problem was a little too much and it took so many resources that the Chefs instead of focusing on their business were diluting their time into other things. If there only existed a better way….

As luck would have it several years ago a very, very smart and extremely successful book salesman realized that he had gotten extremely good at creating this type of buildings for his own business, so much that people constantly would ask him to let them rent some space inside his buildings because they like them so much. He soon realized that this could be his business.

Book salesman in question.

People could go and rent as many building as they needed for whatever needs they had, and not care about bricks, and piping, and deal with infamous old building law anymore, the book salesman would take care of all that for them. He was so successful that he could rent buildings in any region of the world. He would coordinate the central storage and ensure that it was always running!

The Chef realized that any new cook just fresh out of school with a good idea could just come to the book salesman and have a Restaurant chain as big as they wanted instantly! They could focus 100% on their business and make their recipes better and always keep improving the quality, but if the Chef wanted to grow more he had to take care of all those tedious and complicated tasks, he could not just compete! This was a huge danger to his business.

Now the change was very easy because of the Tupperware containers, now he could just rent the building from the book salesman, furnish it, install the microwave like machine to cook (run) the Tupperware containers and he would be ready to go! No need to make sure the rented building had the right ingredients available in its area; everything needed was already in the container!

Now there was no need to take care of the paint of the building, the floors, the pipes, the heating system, etc. The Chef could now concentrate 100% on his business and what was important for his customers.

Here be dragons

This is the end of the story for now and coincidentally it is also as far as I can stretch the analogy. This story has helped me explain why we are using containers and what is the benefit, hope this short story is helpful in your organization as well.