Lidl to Launch Rival to AWS • Hacker News Board

Re: Lidl to Launch Rival to AWS

#121

Post by twic » Tue, May 12, 2020, 8:26 AM UTC

dna_polymerase wrote: post #93

barbecue_sauce wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've only been to Lidls in the US, but their stores seem pretty streamlined to me.

In Germany, their store managers do inventory manually, which means they have to order items they run low on, no tech insight. Their attempt at setting up SAP failed after burning 500 million on it. Delivery robots, Amazon-style prototypes for cashier-less systems, heck, even Instacart like delivery are nowhere to be found. If Amazon decided to enter the German supermarket landscape, Lidl (also, Aldi and others) woul…

> In Germany, their store managers do inventory manually

Do other stores not do this?

I know Tesco did this not too far in the past - they had an IT-enabled process, but it was based on staff going round the shelves, scanning barcodes, and punching a button if stock was low. That's despite them having tons of computer power pointed at store-level sales records.

As someone who doesn't know retail, like most users of this site, it's easy to assume you should drive re-ordering from sales records. I'm not sure that's actually true.

Re: Lidl to Launch Rival to AWS

#122

Post by jotm » Tue, May 12, 2020, 8:27 AM UTC

liberal_098 wrote: post #44

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.

Develop their own tools and get people locked in? Yeah, I don't see that happening, unless maybe they lobby for further EU-wide Internet regulations aimed at keeping US/foreign companies out.

https://lobste.rs/s/wfltz1/eu_commissioned_study_proposes_eu... Oh...

Re: Lidl to Launch Rival to AWS

#123

Post by tekkk » Tue, May 12, 2020, 8:28 AM UTC

I am sceptical but I applaud their effort. If Google has trouble competing, it wont be easy for Lidl either. Yet having a true European option with enough low prices and reliable engineering could work. From my experience retailers dont often have the engineering expertise to pull these kind of things off, but with a culture that empowers developers instead of keeping them as puppets of the managers, they might manage to find and keep good talent.

I hope they at least embrace open-source options and easy billing management, to counter-act the greediness of AWS-way of doing things. Competition in this area is definitely a good thing for all the customers.

Re: Lidl to Launch Rival to AWS

#124

Post by turnipla » Tue, May 12, 2020, 8:29 AM UTC

bflesch wrote: post #116

dna_polymerase wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Germany, their store managers do inventory manually, which means they have to order items they run low on, no tech insight. Their attempt at setting up SAP failed after burning 500 million on it. Delivery robots, Amazon-style prototypes for cashier-less systems, heck, even Instacart like delivery are nowhere to be found. If Amazon decided to enter the German supermarket landscape, Lidl (also, Aldi and others) woul…

That's the thing I tried to point out in my original comment: They don't embrace automation because it will 100% lower prices in the whole industry. In the German market, ALDI/LIDL/REWE currently have a healthy oligopoly. Why destroy end user prices and your own margins by automating? Amazon is not directly attacking their store-focused model because for the billions needed in investment to reach the automation neede…

How does this make sense? Automation lowers prices, not margins.

The prices go down because you don’t have to pay people. If it costs the same, you don’t lower prices just because you’re using automation.

Re: Lidl to Launch Rival to AWS

#125

Post by montenegrohugo » Tue, May 12, 2020, 8:29 AM UTC

eb0la wrote: post #110

SparklingCotton wrote: post #99

Many good reasons why this would work in Europe. - Logistics in Germany is awesome, and Amazon really doesn't have a leg up on the already existing logistics solutions there. - For a cloud provider, negotiating deals now when AMD is on the rise must be perfect. - Beating AWS on EC2 pricing is easy. AWS EC2 pricing is insanely expensive. German providers like Hetzner Cloud entered the market at 1/10th of the EC2 price…

Also, retailers don't like AWS. For them using AWS is gifting money to your biggest natural predator.

Wouldn't they have the same situation with LIDL? LIDL is also a (very) successful retailer, other retailers would have little incentive of helping them make more money.

Also, I'm quite surprised about this announcement. I knew LIDL was in a really good position, but to attempt to compete in the cloud market is impressive. Good luck to them.

Re: Lidl to Launch Rival to AWS

#126

Post by ThePhysicist » Tue, May 12, 2020, 8:32 AM UTC

SparklingCotton wrote: post #99

Many good reasons why this would work in Europe. - Logistics in Germany is awesome, and Amazon really doesn't have a leg up on the already existing logistics solutions there. - For a cloud provider, negotiating deals now when AMD is on the rise must be perfect. - Beating AWS on EC2 pricing is easy. AWS EC2 pricing is insanely expensive. German providers like Hetzner Cloud entered the market at 1/10th of the EC2 price…

We host a lot of our infrastructure on Hetzner Cloud and are very happy, but to be fair it's a long long shot away from what AWS offers. You basically only have compute, storage and networking, only three datacenters and two regions to choose from and no managed services at all. You also can't do advanced networking like announcing your own IP addresses (Hetzner only allows that in colocation). You also only have a few instance types available, with RAM maxing out at 32 GB and no GPU servers available.

Don't get me wrong I love Hetzner and their cloud offering and I think they're doing a fantastic job, but it is not comparable to platforms like AWS, Azure or GCP. It's good enough for simple use cases but I think most large companies that want to switch from on-premise would have a hard time adopting it since so many crucial features are missing.

The LIDL cloud will have the same problem I think: They will probably build it on top of OpenStack or Kubernetes but will never reach feature parity with AWS, Azure or GCP. I think in their niche (retailing, logistics) they might be able to get some good adoption if they offer specific services and infrastructure based on their own use cases and experience, but this isn't really competition for AWS, at least not in the broader sense.

Re: Lidl to Launch Rival to AWS

#127

Post by Torwald » Tue, May 12, 2020, 8:32 AM UTC

montenegrohugo wrote: post #125

eb0la wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, retailers don't like AWS. For them using AWS is gifting money to your biggest natural predator.

Wouldn't they have the same situation with LIDL? LIDL is also a (very) successful retailer, other retailers would have little incentive of helping them make more money. Also, I'm quite surprised about this announcement. I knew LIDL was in a really good position, but to attempt to compete in the cloud market is impressive. Good luck to them.

Maybe, but it's not the "biggest natural predator" the one so big it already started to squeeze you out of your habitat by sheer quasi-monopoly power.

Lidl is easier to keep in check. For at least WalMart (it's happening in Europe) and Aldi a fighting them on their home turf.

Re: Lidl to Launch Rival to AWS

#128

Post by StreamBright » Tue, May 12, 2020, 8:33 AM UTC

SparklingCotton wrote: post #99

Many good reasons why this would work in Europe. - Logistics in Germany is awesome, and Amazon really doesn't have a leg up on the already existing logistics solutions there. - For a cloud provider, negotiating deals now when AMD is on the rise must be perfect. - Beating AWS on EC2 pricing is easy. AWS EC2 pricing is insanely expensive. German providers like Hetzner Cloud entered the market at 1/10th of the EC2 price…

>> For a cloud provider, negotiating deals now when AMD is on the rise must be perfect.

The prime factor driving negotiations is volume. It is going to be hard to beat AWS on this front.

>> Beating AWS on EC2 pricing is easy. AWS EC2 pricing is insanely expensive.

This is simply not true. Taking into account everything you get with EC2 it is in par with other providers.

Factors:

- multiple (redundant) tier1 networking routes

- DDOS protection

- firewall

- redundant power (this almost never the case)

- access management that can easily be tuned to meet with corporate security standards

- network-attached storage that is very flexible with IOPS and size configurations

- multiple different hardware offerings that can match your workload

- elastic scalability (turn on when need more, turn off when no need)

- control over resource allocation down to AZ and shared/non-shared level

I am not saying that everybody needs these, but for those companies which do you won't be able to compete with a cheaper less powerful solution. These are the guys who can calculate what they are paying for and also know what they get, in detail.

There are so many moving parts in a datacenter that you can get wrong (and companies regularly do) that hiring the best dc engineers is going to be the first challenge when building an AWS competitor unless you have a James Hamilton clone stashed somewhere.

Re: Lidl to Launch Rival to AWS

#129

Post by redis_mlc » Tue, May 12, 2020, 8:34 AM UTC

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #86

bflesch wrote: post #60

I've been to LIDL / Schwarz Group headquarters in Heilbronn last year, and while they're a super young company with a vibrant atmosphere (which quite unique amongst large German companies), IMO they are ultimately too much attached to their legacy cash cows. They are not streamlining retail processes because they earn too much money with it. They have great IT talent, which is building fancy pilots all day, but refus…

>building fancy pilots all day, but refuse roll them out because it will cannibalize their core business That's the big difference I've noticed between German and US companies. In German companies if you are an exec that brought success to the company in the past then your word is the law and focus is on keeping the status quo and make sure that any new ventures don't make existing higher ups obsolete. Whereas in US…

> Famous examples being how Netflix pivoted from DVD rentals

Not to nitpick your overall post, but let me explain the context better.

Netflix is named "Net flix" because the original plan was to offer a streaming product ASAP, but investors and end-users weren't ready at the time.

So mailing DVDs was done initially, and because of a loophole in USPS pricing rules, was a genius move when looking at cost. (Netflix historically has employed a former Postmaster General to stay on top of that.)

Source: worked there, read a bunch of stuff on this.

Re: Lidl to Launch Rival to AWS

#130

Post by Torwald » Tue, May 12, 2020, 8:35 AM UTC

kleiba wrote: post #106

SparklingCotton wrote: post #99

Many good reasons why this would work in Europe. - Logistics in Germany is awesome, and Amazon really doesn't have a leg up on the already existing logistics solutions there. - For a cloud provider, negotiating deals now when AMD is on the rise must be perfect. - Beating AWS on EC2 pricing is easy. AWS EC2 pricing is insanely expensive. German providers like Hetzner Cloud entered the market at 1/10th of the EC2 price…

Right. Plus, let's not forget the legal implications for the companies that will be able to keep their data within Europe.

This is big. And it can only grow with future legislation. This could tie in to security measures and standards in the future. We will see what happens, but it is a strategic advantage as for now.