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Lidl to Launch Rival to AWS

chargedretail.co.uk

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Re: Lidl to Launch Rival to AWS

#191

Post by eb0la »

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.

I am betting they will provide only: - Block + Object storage (can be done with off-the-shelf hardware). - Compute instances - VPC networking. - Kubernetes (o k8s-managed services). - An open-source database. Probably postgress.

Re: Lidl to Launch Rival to AWS

#192

Post by jon-wood »

londons_explore wrote: post #109
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…

In the UK, discounted or damaged items have a special sticker meaning "discounted to £0.70". That sticker has a barcode on, and is what is scanned at the checkout. That means they have no way to know which items were sold, since all those discount stickers are the same, no matter what item they were affixed to. Given that, I don't see any way they could do decent stock control in-store. If you don't know what went ou…

I don't have any insider information, but it doesn't seem crazy to think that those discount stickers aren't in fact the same. At the very least they have the actual discounted price encoded them, it wouldn't be a big leap for the label printer to register a new SKU for "Semi-skimmed Milk, discounted to £0.30" so they can still track that item's stock.

Re: Lidl to Launch Rival to AWS

#193

Post by odiroot »

benjohnson1707 wrote: post #96

Former Schwarz employee here: The company made SO much money in the past 4 decades with big box / discount retailing, you won't believe it. Salaries are off the charts (it would make senior software engineers in SV look pale). Hubris is as well. The only thing that drives reasoning are statements like 'we're not just some random company, we're Schwarz Group'. It's the poster child Corp described by Andy Gorves statem…

> They are getting into the car sales and recycle business as well. Just to give you an impression.

They were also supposed to get into housing.

Re: Lidl to Launch Rival to AWS

#194

Post by eb0la »

CiPHPerCoder wrote: post #12

I don't want to sound dismissive, but I don't think their acquisition is going to be enough for them to compete with AWS. https://www.camao.one/de-de/referenzen Unless they have some other cards they haven't played yet, this sounds more like a headline intended for investors rather than customers.

70 people is not much for, except for a vertical solution. If they can sell/co-host big warehouse management like Manhattan at a fraction of AWS, they could succeed.

Re: Lidl to Launch Rival to AWS

#195

Post by mprev »

loltyler1 wrote: post #178
BiteCode_dev wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, "my data is handled by a company under the EU law" is quite a good sale pitch these days.

It is not.

You'll need to give some more detail.

When I worked with a European cloud host, customers in Germany demanded German data centres and EU ownership. I've seen enough people/companies ask for that to convince me there's at least some demand.

What's your reason for saying it's not a good differentiator?

Re: Lidl to Launch Rival to AWS

#196

Post by ido »

niwork wrote: post #175
delcaran wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can confirm. As senior software developer I made 25K EUR in 2019.

That's a very poor salary for your job, if you don't mind me saying. Are you in Italy? What's the cost of living like? Salaries in Europe are generally quite low for devs compared to the US. I think it's best in the UK. Starting salary will average ~£25k, rising to ~£35k as you get more senior, then maybe £~45-55k one you're 5-10 years in. This is excluding London and contract-based work, of course.

In Germany at the senior (10+ years) scale €70k/year is not unusual & if you work for the better paid companies (like google) you can expect significantly more.

Re: Lidl to Launch Rival to AWS

#197

Post by dragonwriter »

ryan-allen wrote: post #145
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…

> 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. This has always been my problem with AWS. Cost savings might make sense for someone who actually needs 200 servers but if I just want one I'm paying 10 times as much for half as much in terms of performance. It rubs me the wrong way when a $70/mo AWS instance…

> It rubs me the wrong way when a $70/mo AWS instance is more than twice as slow than a $10/mo 'traditional' VPS instance.

Elastic compute of the type provided by EC2 and similar services (Google Compute Engine, etc.) is a fundamentally different service than simple VPS. AWS has something that is, or is very close to, a simple VPS in LightSail, and the pricing is pretty competitive with other VPS providers.

LightSail doesn't have a $70/mo instance, the closest is $80/mo for a 16GB RAM, 4-core, 320GB SSD instance with 6TB of transfer quota. The least expensive is $3.50/mo, and $10/mo gets you 2GB RAM, 1 core, 60GB SSD, and 3TB transfer.

Re: Lidl to Launch Rival to AWS

#198

Post by mprev »

dragonwriter wrote: post #188
BiteCode_dev wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, "my data is handled by a company under the EU law" is quite a good sale pitch these days.

> Also, "my data is handled by a company under the EU law" is quite a good sale pitch these days. Everyone operating in the EU is under EU law, including Amazon, so it's certainly not a competitive pitch vs. Amazon, however much it might be on a checklist of things customers are looking for.

From the perspective of a customer who cares about these things, though, there is a difference between a non-EU company bound by EU law and an EU head quartered company.

I'm not saying it's enough to build an AWS-sized business or that Lidl is in a position to do it but there are cloud hosts who sell themselves specifically on that, such Exoscale.com

Re: Lidl to Launch Rival to AWS

#200

Post by turnipla »

bflesch wrote: post #152
turnipla wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Of course automation lowers prices, but only for the customers, for LIDL it will first of all decrease revenues. Once LIDL's (and other discounters) customers move towards ordering on the internet, they will not queue up at the cashiers' any more and therefore the revenue with LIDL's highest-margin products - the trash & cheap alcohol that is stocked in the cashiers desk waiting area - will evaporate. It took me a lo…

You’re talking about ecommerce, not automation.

Automation is unrelated to where products are sold.

Automation might just mean one fewer cashier at a regular store.

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