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Lidl’s parent company launches cloud unit to offer ‘Made in Germany’ AWS rival

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Re: Lidl’s parent company launches cloud unit to offer ‘Made in Germany’ AWS rival

#21

I do not understand the purpose of AWS style cloud platforms. What's wrong with Hetzner or Contabo? What is the advantage of paying 270€ per month for a 60GB RAM instance with 8 cores if you can get the same instance on Contabo for 27€? It really feels like these cloud platforms are following the Microtransaction model of mobile games.

Scalability and in code provisioning

Re: Lidl’s parent company launches cloud unit to offer ‘Made in Germany’ AWS rival

#22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless EU governments pass protectionist laws requiring the use of local services.

It's literally only a problem because the US laws allow the US government to force MS / Google / Amazon to hand over all data stored by German companies on data residing in German datacenters located inside Germany, if an American company is running them. That bullshit caused us a huge amount of headaches when we wanted to deploy our COVID systems to Azure...

CMEK was introduced for this. NSA can have the data but won’t ever read it

Re: Lidl’s parent company launches cloud unit to offer ‘Made in Germany’ AWS rival

#23

I do not understand the purpose of AWS style cloud platforms. What's wrong with Hetzner or Contabo? What is the advantage of paying 270€ per month for a 60GB RAM instance with 8 cores if you can get the same instance on Contabo for 27€? It really feels like these cloud platforms are following the Microtransaction model of mobile games.

Is Hetzner 10x cheaper on GPU costs too?

I recently discovered our logging was costing $3,000/mo at GCP. For freaking logs.

Re: Lidl’s parent company launches cloud unit to offer ‘Made in Germany’ AWS rival

#24

It looks more like B2B cloud at least from past informations about it not sure about AWS rivality.

AWS is huge. The entire Lidl group made €57bn last year. Just AWS made about $62bn, so pretty much the same thing. And AWS is growing about 30% per year.

More than that, AWS is just one piece of the pie. Azure supposedly made about $38bn last year, also growing by about 30% per year.

Alibaba and GCP both made about $10bn and they're both growing at about the same pace as Azure and AWS.

And I didn't even include IBM or Oracle.

How much is Lidl actually investing in this? A few billions, at most?

I'd love to be proven wrong and I definitely think Europe needs at least a few top notch cloud providers, but it's going to be an uphill battle.

Re: Lidl’s parent company launches cloud unit to offer ‘Made in Germany’ AWS rival

#25
post #13

Their products lead to a complex "Get advice now" form. Guess I'll stick with my 'Made in Cyprus' VPS provider that lets me create and destroy VPS instances with a couple of clicks for a similar price.

I don't know whether running a vps for sensitive data in production is a good choice with a small cypriot host...

I know some of my dudes running tor services on turkish-part of Cyprus and believe me they really care about their customers due to the competitive nature of the business.

Re: Lidl’s parent company launches cloud unit to offer ‘Made in Germany’ AWS rival

#26

I do not understand the purpose of AWS style cloud platforms. What's wrong with Hetzner or Contabo? What is the advantage of paying 270€ per month for a 60GB RAM instance with 8 cores if you can get the same instance on Contabo for 27€? It really feels like these cloud platforms are following the Microtransaction model of mobile games.

Scalability and in code provisioning

which for most people is, the aspiration that they might need scalability

Re: Lidl’s parent company launches cloud unit to offer ‘Made in Germany’ AWS rival

#27

As long as I can't provision these service myself without having to "call for advice" I am not using it irregardless of the price. It's 2022 and any company still hiding behind "call for pricing" or "call for quote" that isn't servicing government agencies is going to be eaten alive by any other provider not making customer run thought hoops. They claim they are the German AWS when they miss the first thing that Bezo…

Wow, I thought you were joking, but you really weren't. From the homepage it took me 7 clicks to drill-down into information about a specific compute service and see pricing, and it leads to their generic contact form page: https://www.stackit.de/en/contact They're really missing that these big digital movements / transformations typically start out as a single person investigating / fiddling around with the service…

I guess Lidl targets German Mittelstand and DAX40 companies that already have outsourced to other cloud vendors or are in trouble with their legacy infrastructure.

How many of the startups you have in mind didn't switch their infra once they grew? I know not a single one.

Re: Lidl’s parent company launches cloud unit to offer ‘Made in Germany’ AWS rival

#28
post #2

2025 - Lidi acquired by AWS.

I know it's more of a joke, but some people might think this might actually happen. Here is why not:

The Schwarz Group (Lidl's parent, as well as Kaufland's parent) is the largest privately held company in Germany and the largest retailer in the EU. While it's not owned by the Schwarz brothers anymore, as they have died, they transferred their ownership into a "non-profit" "charitable" foundation upon death. The foundation itself is in turn controlled by other foundations, which are then controlled by a mix of family members and hired trustees. Selling this is virtually impossible, as everybody would have to agree.

While Schwarz is small compared to Amazon (~143 billion USD vs ~470 billion USD in 2021 revenue), they aren't exactly a lightweight either. Look what "tiny" twitter (barely over 1 billion USD in revenue) is gonna cost a Musk...

Maybe at some point Schwarz might sell off just the cloud stuff. But if it's gonna be profitable they are unlikely to. And it's likely profitable or close to it from day one, as they already did most the hard work to support their internal IT needs. And they are a big name brand around here, known to do things "right" in their space (unlike e.g. Telekom/T-Systems) and a lot of German and European players have been looking at GDPR-compliant EU-based alternatives to AWS for quite a while.

Re: Lidl’s parent company launches cloud unit to offer ‘Made in Germany’ AWS rival

#30

As long as I can't provision these service myself without having to "call for advice" I am not using it irregardless of the price. It's 2022 and any company still hiding behind "call for pricing" or "call for quote" that isn't servicing government agencies is going to be eaten alive by any other provider not making customer run thought hoops. They claim they are the German AWS when they miss the first thing that Bezo…

Wow, I thought you were joking, but you really weren't. From the homepage it took me 7 clicks to drill-down into information about a specific compute service and see pricing, and it leads to their generic contact form page: https://www.stackit.de/en/contact They're really missing that these big digital movements / transformations typically start out as a single person investigating / fiddling around with the service…

Germany is generally quite corporate. Yes, there is a large number of small, family owned, niche, businesses, but those don't really play in the IT space that much.

Outside of that, it's just the Deutsche Banks, Daimlers, Bosches and Bayers of the world.

And those are in general much more rigid than the equivalent US companies.

Which in the field of software is suicide. There's a reason we call it "software".

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