Funny how Germany is obsessed with privacy, yet the cookie consent prompt requires extra clicks to decline the consent.
Germany weaponises data privacy and uses it to lock out foreign competitors.
Lidl’s parent company launches cloud unit to offer ‘Made in Germany’ AWS rival
61–70 of 148 posts
Re: Lidl’s parent company launches cloud unit to offer ‘Made in Germany’ AWS rival
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
which for most people is, the aspiration that they might need scalability
Or just the peace of mind of being able to fully recreate infrastructure easily, if need be. Code, you know, version control, diffs, CI/CD pipelines, inherent live "documentation" (up to a point, of course you won't know the "why", but you'll know most of the "how" and "what", git offering the "who").
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Re: Lidl’s parent company launches cloud unit to offer ‘Made in Germany’ AWS rival
#63As 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…
I am going to start working for one of those German cloud providers (not Schwarz Group) next month.
As far as I understand so far, the barrier-to-entry is actually a feature.
Those providers usually strictly target the B2B sector, with a focus on small to medium companies which only now start to do "digitalization". They usually still run with old-fashioned IT departments and certainly no budget to hire a full DevOps department with experienced senior developers.
For that reason, the German providers usually don't focus on scale and automation as the support burden is rather high. Hosting in Germany, and being compliant by default with many data protection rules is a big plus for inexperienced customers. But I imagine, this also leads to high customer retention due to de-facto lock-in.
Note that the article says that they are using a "proprietary" cloud platform. In my experience, in Germany "Cloud" is still a very ill-defined marketing term. It might well be possible that the "Cloud" just means that you can use a WYSIWYG interface to provision Linux VM templates (see for example the IONOS "Data Center Designer").
I had to look at the "Stackit" homepage itself to confirm that they are indeed hosting a Kubernetes based PaaS. But they indeed seem to focus on dynamic VM-Hosting and even colocation. They even mention SAP hosting!
In the past, United Internet, Deutsche Telekom and some others had a hosted e-mail offering branded as "Internet made in Germany" for similar reasons.
Another company of the "Internet made in Germany" group is Strato. They started with website and shop builders, and now make a lot of money essentially offering hosted Owncloud/Seafile services. Usually those are also marketed as a "Cloud" offering.
Re: Lidl’s parent company launches cloud unit to offer ‘Made in Germany’ AWS rival
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is Hetzner 10x cheaper on GPU costs too? I recently discovered our logging was costing $3,000/mo at GCP. For freaking logs.
What kind of volume of logs were you generating, too? And was there some sort of processing thing running on those logs? You'd have to pay for that compute.
Lots of logspam volume that I'm immediately going to tamp down.
But it's also got me thinking I'm going to buy a bunch of GPUs this month and stand up our own ML compute cluster.
We'll still run CRUD in the cloud, but I'm getting sick of paying for cloud GPUs. The GKE / GPU interface leaves tons of spare compute on the table anyway.
Re: Lidl’s parent company launches cloud unit to offer ‘Made in Germany’ AWS rival
#65Hetzner is the AWS of Germany already. Good luck breaking into this space with the "Call for pricing" mentality mentioned in the comments.
I love hetzner but they aren't really the AWS of Germany - they are a great place to get simple cheap instances but don't have many of the more complex offerings that would make them an 'AWS'.
Re: Lidl’s parent company launches cloud unit to offer ‘Made in Germany’ AWS rival
#66As a German I would like to point out, that German companies are (as always) too late to the party. Nothing with worldwide relevance in the software, AI nor cloud space came out of Germany / the EU within in the last decades. It's embarrassing :(
It's sad, even sap runs a lot on aws
I thought they have their own “SAP cloud”
but maybe it’s just some marketing BS
Re: Lidl’s parent company launches cloud unit to offer ‘Made in Germany’ AWS rival
#67As 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…
>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
7 clicks? I count a single click to basic prices and two clicks to full pdf pricelist?
https://www.stackit.de/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/220601_STA...
Re: Lidl’s parent company launches cloud unit to offer ‘Made in Germany’ AWS rival
#68The reason for this is that the GDPR limits EU countries from deploying in countries like the USA who do not respect privacy. Due to the various US laws (Cloud Act) using infrastructure from an US-owned company is also a huge issue. There is a huge gap in the market for an EU-owned and EU-focussed cloud provider with the main issue being that it is extremely capital intensive..
Doesn't hetzner do this?
Kinda but not really. Hetzner targets small businesses, etc, or at least they have the reputation to do that. Large companies in the EU will mostly avoid them for anything serious, because they do not seem "reliable" and "stable" and "big" enough. Same thing with OVH. One of OVH's data centers burning down did additional reputational damage (which happened because they seem to have skipped on proper fire suppression systems in order to build it faster). I am sure Hetzners reputation took a hit as well, even though they had nothing to do with it, but are kind of considered to be on the same tier as OVH.
Re: Lidl’s parent company launches cloud unit to offer ‘Made in Germany’ AWS rival
#69As a German I would like to point out, that German companies are (as always) too late to the party. Nothing with worldwide relevance in the software, AI nor cloud space came out of Germany / the EU within in the last decades. It's embarrassing :(
On the other hand, you created Lidl and Aldi. So that’s not worth nothing.
Re: Lidl’s parent company launches cloud unit to offer ‘Made in Germany’ AWS rival
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
which for most people is, the aspiration that they might need scalability
Or just the peace of mind of being able to fully recreate infrastructure easily, if need be. Code, you know, version control, diffs, CI/CD pipelines, inherent live "documentation" (up to a point, of course you won't know the "why", but you'll know most of the "how" and "what", git offering the "who").
But at what price… I have said it here many times, but I am a nobody so I can repeat it; one of my weekend side businesses is optimising overall performance for companies. They contact me with something like ‘I am paying 50k$/mo for aws and out app still goes down with traffic’. The case I did today one month ago was doing 10k/mo on aws and that jumps up mentally with traffic. This is a SaaS site and startup and they are bootstrapped. I moved all over to docker compose and then to a $10/mo vps; it didn’t crash and burn and now they make profit. This is not apples to apples; they made a complete shitshow on aws and in their code and their db (on rds). So I fixed some things and moved it over. On aws this improved setup would still be 10x or more expensive. It is very visible that most startup owners never saw a crisis now; this took me 12 hours… so that’s about 2k$ cost for me for a $9990 saving per month.