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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

#111

Post by yayachiken »

barry-cotter wrote: post #77
kalaido wrote: post #3

As 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 not a German thing. It’s a European thing. Lots of Europeans have made huge contributions to technology working in US companies, mostly in the US because that’s where the money is.

They don't even have to work for US companies. As a recent example, the Dirty Pipe vulnerability was discovered by a German Engineer working for a very basic website hoster.

He found it when he was investigating a customer complaint about corrupted log file downloads.

There is still in-depth high-value engineering happening, even if you don't work for the flashy silicon valley VC unicorns.

In fact, such a basic support request would probably have been closed as "could not reproduce" in a highly competitive environment.

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

#112

Post by arinlen »

krab wrote: post #52
oblio wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

A bit more than half of the added value in Germany is created by companies with less than 500 employees and less than €50M yearly turnover (Mittelstand). There is in fact a lot of specialized machinery vendors providing significant value. Not sure what are their IT needs, but I guess the larger SMEs are the target market for this service.

> Not sure what are their IT needs, but I guess the larger SMEs are the target market for this service.

I'd argue that SMEs are the ideal market for cloud services.

Small shops with even smaller teams comprised of jack-of-all-trades are willing to pay a hefty premium for managed services that allow their teams for get things done without having to do everything themselves.

Once your company grows beyond the definition of a SME, its able to roll their own infrastructure and do their thing in more cost-effective ways that don't involve handing over their core business to external and even foreign companies.

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

#113

Post by ByteJockey »

imtringued wrote: post #17

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.

> 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€?

For some random raw EC2 server? Zilch. Zero. EC2 isn't really worth it by itself.

But EC2 isn't the only thing AWS has. Devs are pretty expensive. If you just need to run some random code in the cloud, futzing with a server somewhere for a couple hours making sure it's compliant with all of the enterprise standards costs many hundreds of dollars in dev pay. Lambda just works, and has a free tier. Setting up a proper queuing system is annoying and takes a few hours to do right. That's another couple hundred dollars. SQS is reasonably good and you can have that dev go do other things instead.

These things start to add up fast, and when you do everything yourself, you start to end up with thousands of dollars per month in maintenance costs. You can absolutely do that with AWS as well, but the goal is usually to just let AWS take care of that and have your employees do something that's actually valuable to the business (usually implementing proprietary business logic, which neither AWS nor Hetzner will do for you).

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

#114

Post by kazen44 »

yayachiken wrote: post #111
barry-cotter wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not a German thing. It’s a European thing. Lots of Europeans have made huge contributions to technology working in US companies, mostly in the US because that’s where the money is.

They don't even have to work for US companies. As a recent example, the Dirty Pipe vulnerability was discovered by a German Engineer working for a very basic website hoster. He found it when he was investigating a customer complaint about corrupted log file downloads. There is still in-depth high-value engineering happening, even if you don't work for the flashy silicon valley VC unicorns. In fact, such a basic suppo…

another Good example of this is the work RIPE is doing in regards to its work in securing the internet/bgp peering the model of ixp's as a community compared to how it works in the US.

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

#115

Post by pjmlp »

krab wrote: post #52
oblio wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

A bit more than half of the added value in Germany is created by companies with less than 500 employees and less than €50M yearly turnover (Mittelstand). There is in fact a lot of specialized machinery vendors providing significant value. Not sure what are their IT needs, but I guess the larger SMEs are the target market for this service.

Which is why most of them hire consulting shops, as they see IT as a pure cost center.

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

#116

Post by pjmlp »

arinlen wrote: post #112
krab wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A bit more than half of the added value in Germany is created by companies with less than 500 employees and less than €50M yearly turnover (Mittelstand). There is in fact a lot of specialized machinery vendors providing significant value. Not sure what are their IT needs, but I guess the larger SMEs are the target market for this service.

> Not sure what are their IT needs, but I guess the larger SMEs are the target market for this service. I'd argue that SMEs are the ideal market for cloud services. Small shops with even smaller teams comprised of jack-of-all-trades are willing to pay a hefty premium for managed services that allow their teams for get things done without having to do everything themselves. Once your company grows beyond the definitio…

At the beginning, then they hire the likes of HCL, Infosys, Wipro, TCS,.... because IT isn't their core business, and C levels see it as a cost center and distraction.

Eventually the few devs left get "sold" to the contracting company, with the architects left as management for the contractors.

Have seen this happening already several times since 2007.

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

#117

Post by ushakov »

est31 wrote: post #79
kalaido wrote: post #3

As 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 :(

> Nothing with worldwide relevance in the software, AI nor cloud space came out of Germany / the EU within in the last decades. Let me list some: * Teamviewer: used to be more famous in the past but it is still a known brand to people world wide * Cherry: more of a hardware thing, but they are known world-wide for their MX switches * Deepl: a xoogler founded startup that is better than Google translate * Soundcloud:…

these are exceptions

US produces more unicorns per year that Germany managed in 20 years

https://news.crunchbase.com/unicorn-company-list/

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

#118

Post by BonoboIO »

mkl95 wrote: 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.

Can u name the company?

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

#119

Post by stnikolauswagne »

pjmlp wrote: post #115
krab wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A bit more than half of the added value in Germany is created by companies with less than 500 employees and less than €50M yearly turnover (Mittelstand). There is in fact a lot of specialized machinery vendors providing significant value. Not sure what are their IT needs, but I guess the larger SMEs are the target market for this service.

Which is why most of them hire consulting shops, as they see IT as a pure cost center.

The irony is that a lot of the consulting shops that specialize in assisting the mittelstand are utterly horrendous money pits. In my capacity as CTO for a german mittelstand company I have had to fire over 80% of the consulting shops i worked with for either blatant incompetence (developing a plugin that fits none of the design document, deploying it straight to production and in the process blowing up the entire API) or insane overcharging (24 hours of billed work for an adjustment that took me less than an hour of time to reimplement when the next update inevitably broke their adjustment). Everyone else I have talked to in the field has had similar experiences, with truly positive experiences being very rare, yet all the owners I talk to refuse to hire qualified in-house staff because the prospect of paying 60k+ for a SWE is unthinkable.

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

#120

Post by Cwizard »

lupire wrote: post #87
logronoide wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t mean German technology is bad. Quite the opposite. But trying to sell cloud infra technology in Europe saying “Made in Germany” simply it will not work. It sounds ridiculous, moreover when the parent company flagship brand (Lidl) means “low cost low quality for Eastern European immigrants”. It sounds so bizarre and out of context that I’m starting to hear about Lidl Cloud jokes around me.

Amazon is low cost low quality retailer, with a successful Cloud offering.

It was not always that way however. 10 years ago Amazon was a great place to shop!
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