Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Lidl to Launch Rival to AWS

chargedretail.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 516 posts

Re: Lidl to Launch Rival to AWS

#41

Post by drawfloat »

While the concerns over Schwarz Group's (because it is the parent group, not 'Lidl') lack of experience in the sector is valid, I do think some of the dismissive reactions here underline a major risk to future competitiveness in infrastructure providers.

Amazon is well established. Amazon has thousands of employees. Amazon does, ultimately, provide a good service. But Amazon is also dominant, demonstrates a callous disregard for worker rights in its other business arms, and has used its solid AWS profits as a way to prop up its undercutting and dismantling of other sectors.

Other businesses will not enter the space in as developed a state as AWS. That shouldn't be used as a negative against them even trying. Otherwise, AWS is only going to become more entrenched and the options for building at scale will become more limited.

Re: Lidl to Launch Rival to AWS

#42

Post by cameronbrown »

gibolt wrote: post #31
bigtones wrote: post #7

"The acquisition, which completed on May 1, brings 70 cloud specialists into the wider group”. For comparison, Amazon has 40,000 employees in AWS.

Surely it can't be that many. And if it is, that has to include janitors at their data centers.

Sure it can. Also, a lot more engineers are required to take a product to market at a big corp than a startup.

Re: Lidl to Launch Rival to AWS

#44

Post by liberal_098 »

ksec wrote: post #21

If Hetzner ( Also from Germany ) cant / isn't competing with AWS, why does Lidl thinks they can? It then also mention Delivery in UK, and ecommerce projects . Which makes me doubt if the publication knows what AWS really is. The whole piece ( If you can even call it a piece ) is very poor reporting, to the point I am thinking of should I be flagging this. Edit: Please Read Comment by Cu3PO42 https://news.ycombinator.…

> If Hetzner ( Also from Germany ) cant / isn't competing with AWS, why does Lidl thinks they can?

Probably they want to repeat the success of AWS and apply the same pattern. Their retail businesses will provide base load for the cloud. Their own services can be developed in such a way that they can sell them to other retailers as cloud services. Or they develop a market place and switch to platform business.

Re: Lidl to Launch Rival to AWS

#45

Post by bashtoni »

This sounds like a misunderstanding to me.

When you look at the details, it looks much more as though they're launching an alternative to Ocado, a company providing technology for food retailers to offer home delivery - they work with Kroger in the US.

Re: Lidl to Launch Rival to AWS

#46

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

Eikon wrote: post #19
rumanator wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't want for a cloud provider a world class service that is cheap?

Lidl is not world class, it’s just cheap.

Lidl is world class and cheap. It's a solid operation, and has a long history of successfully undercutting "premium" brands.

But more interestingly the move suggests Amazon is in danger of real competition in commoditised cloud infrastructure, as well as retail marketing and logistics.

To an outsider, AWS is an incomprehensible mess of confusing service offerings which is nearly impossible to cost and only slightly easier to set up.

It's not hard to imagine a B2B offering which simplifies and commodifies the technology on offer and the way it's paid for.

And a B2C offering which copies Amazon Marketplace but with more consistent product quality.

Re: Lidl to Launch Rival to AWS

#47

Post by voz_ »

saagarjha wrote: post #43
bigtones wrote: post #7

"The acquisition, which completed on May 1, brings 70 cloud specialists into the wider group”. For comparison, Amazon has 40,000 employees in AWS.

Do they really? That’s an absurd number even by large company standards.

Its not so crazy if you think of every AWS product as its own med-large startup... That being said, that is a rather large number in terms of absolute company size.

Re: Lidl to Launch Rival to AWS

#48

Post by discodave »

speedgoose wrote: post #32
bigtones wrote: post #7

"The acquisition, which completed on May 1, brings 70 cloud specialists into the wider group”. For comparison, Amazon has 40,000 employees in AWS.

They will probably not attempt to compete against AWS on everything but focus on the core cloud technologies using off the shelf software and hardware. An alternative of EC2, S3, and ELB is already interesting and many companies provide that with fewer employees. No need to waste resources on products such as AWS Greengrass, or AWS Lumberyard, or even AWS EKS.

Just EC2 networking (VPC) is several hundred, maybe 1000 employees.

My guess at the total headcount for EC2 would be several thousand employees.

Source: worked as an engineer at Amazon, including EC2 for 5 years.

Re: Lidl to Launch Rival to AWS

#49

Post by saagarjha »

cameronbrown wrote: post #42
gibolt wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely it can't be that many. And if it is, that has to include janitors at their data centers.

Sure it can. Also, a lot more engineers are required to take a product to market at a big corp than a startup.

That’s more engineers than all of Facebook, AFAIK, and they’re not known for being particularly lean.
Post reply on HN