DEV Community

ECTA Tecnologia
ECTA Tecnologia

Posted on

Building a Restaurant Operating System as Infrastructure (OpenAPI + MCP + AI Discovery)

#api #saas #webdev #ai

Building a Restaurant Operating System as Infrastructure (OpenAPI + MCP + AI Discovery)

Most restaurant software today is built around marketplaces.

Orders, customers, and operations are often controlled by third-party platforms.

I’ve been working on a different approach: treating restaurant software as infrastructure, not as a marketplace layer.

What is ECTA?

ECTA is a Restaurant Operating System (ROS) designed as a first-party infrastructure platform.

Instead of acting as an intermediary, it provides the underlying systems that restaurants use to operate:

  • Order management
  • Digital menus (PWA)
  • POS
  • WhatsApp automation
  • QR-based table ordering
  • Delivery workflows
  • Customer management

The goal is simple: give restaurants full control over their operations and data.

Infrastructure, not marketplace

Most platforms sit between the restaurant and the customer.

ECTA is designed to sit inside the restaurant operation itself.

That means:

  • Orders are processed as first-party data
  • Customer relationships are owned by the restaurant
  • Operational workflows are not dependent on aggregators

Designing for interoperability

From the beginning, the platform was designed to be integrated, not isolated.

Instead of closed systems, it exposes a structured interface:

  • OpenAPI (3.1) for API schema
  • Machine-readable identity endpoints
  • Capability descriptors
  • AI-oriented discovery layer

You can explore the API schema here:

https://ecta.com.br/.well-known/openapi.json

Machine-readable platform identity

One interesting part of the architecture is the use of machine-readable identity endpoints.

These allow systems (and AI agents) to understand what the platform is and how to interact with it.

Available endpoints:

AI discovery layer

To make the platform easier to interpret by external systems, I created a dedicated AI entrypoint:

https://ecta.com.br/ai

This page acts as a structured overview of:

  • Platform classification
  • Capabilities
  • Integration model
  • Machine-readable endpoints

It’s essentially a bridge between human-readable documentation and machine-consumable interfaces.

Why this approach

Instead of building features first, the focus here is on:

  • Infrastructure ownership
  • Interoperability
  • Automation readiness

The idea is that restaurant systems should behave more like programmable platforms, not isolated tools.

Current state

The platform is structured and publicly accessible at:

Final thought

There’s still a lot to evolve, but treating restaurant software as infrastructure instead of a marketplace opens a different design space.

Curious to hear thoughts from people building APIs, platforms, or working with real-world operations systems.

Top comments (0)