Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Dutch central bank ditches AWS and chooses Lidl for European Cloud

techzine.eu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 157 posts

Re: Dutch central bank ditches AWS and chooses Lidl for European Cloud

#11

Post by xfactorial »

retired wrote: post #5

Years ago I was making the case that instead of digging ourselves into the Amazon eco-system with S3 storage, EC2 instances, DynamoDB and various other Amazon specific cloud products... we should just host virtual machines and have everything in there using open source products. People looked at me like they saw water burning but that would have made the dependency on the US a lot easier to sever. Just move the VM's.

The whole business model is around “Optimization through custom tools”.

We can go with your idea, sure: a few months in, an Account Manager from the cloud provider shows up and says your bill could be reduced by 50% if you just adopt some changes, using their custom, super optimized tools (“minor changes” will be the mantra).

And now you have your own company looking back to you on how can they get those savings, people who don’t understand what a VM is and cannot differentiate salesforce from an elastic container, as everything is “cloud”, but heard “50% off”.

Re: Dutch central bank ditches AWS and chooses Lidl for European Cloud

#13

Post by storus »

pier25 wrote: post #10

Wait... Lidl has a cloud service now?

Schwarz seems to be obsessed with how Amazon (book seller) created AWS and they are trying to do the same... with 5 people. Also Aleph Alpha + Cohere is a Lidl work as the current CEO of the former led Lidl digital division.

Re: Dutch central bank ditches AWS and chooses Lidl for European Cloud

#14

Post by nine_k »

retired wrote: post #5

Years ago I was making the case that instead of digging ourselves into the Amazon eco-system with S3 storage, EC2 instances, DynamoDB and various other Amazon specific cloud products... we should just host virtual machines and have everything in there using open source products. People looked at me like they saw water burning but that would have made the dependency on the US a lot easier to sever. Just move the VM's.

Most cloud VMs have network-attached storage working through a billing layer, and its IOPS numbers are pathetic. This makes running your own DB in a cloud VM much less reasonable. Now you can use local NVMe, but you still have to set up your own failover.

The original promise of the cloud is "you pay us less than you pay your sysadmins", which is not entirely unreasonable, especially at early stages.

Of course running on bare metal from Europe's own Hetzner is even more cost-efficient, if you already have a lot of sysadmin chops.

Re: Dutch central bank ditches AWS and chooses Lidl for European Cloud

#16

Post by scandox »

storus wrote: post #13
pier25 wrote: post #10

Wait... Lidl has a cloud service now?

Schwarz seems to be obsessed with how Amazon (book seller) created AWS and they are trying to do the same... with 5 people. Also Aleph Alpha + Cohere is a Lidl work as the current CEO of the former led Lidl digital division.

So the 7,500 they say they're employing...is not true?

Re: Dutch central bank ditches AWS and chooses Lidl for European Cloud

#17

Post by walrus01 »

xfactorial wrote: post #11
retired wrote: post #5

Years ago I was making the case that instead of digging ourselves into the Amazon eco-system with S3 storage, EC2 instances, DynamoDB and various other Amazon specific cloud products... we should just host virtual machines and have everything in there using open source products. People looked at me like they saw water burning but that would have made the dependency on the US a lot easier to sever. Just move the VM's.

The whole business model is around “Optimization through custom tools”. We can go with your idea, sure: a few months in, an Account Manager from the cloud provider shows up and says your bill could be reduced by 50% if you just adopt some changes, using their custom, super optimized tools (“minor changes” will be the mantra). And now you have your own company looking back to you on how can they get those savings, peo…

Preventing this from happening requires a clued-in CTO and equivalent senior level leadership who can defend against such 'attack' methods and knows the difference between, for instance, paying a monthly recurring cost to host a Linux/KVM virtual machine and paying for some totally 'cloud' SaAs.

Further, it needs people in decision making roles who understand and value the strategic differences between having an infrastructure concept that is trapped in one provider's proprietary software tooling ecosystem (aws, azure, etc), vs things built on open standards that are portable.

Re: Dutch central bank ditches AWS and chooses Lidl for European Cloud

#18

Post by ambicapter »

scandox wrote: post #16
storus wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Schwarz seems to be obsessed with how Amazon (book seller) created AWS and they are trying to do the same... with 5 people. Also Aleph Alpha + Cohere is a Lidl work as the current CEO of the former led Lidl digital division.

So the 7,500 they say they're employing...is not true?

Lidl is a grocery store chain, I'm assuming GP was talking about the amount of people actually working on the cloud.

Re: Dutch central bank ditches AWS and chooses Lidl for European Cloud

#20

Post by [deleted] »

storus wrote: post #13
pier25 wrote: post #10

Wait... Lidl has a cloud service now?

Schwarz seems to be obsessed with how Amazon (book seller) created AWS and they are trying to do the same... with 5 people. Also Aleph Alpha + Cohere is a Lidl work as the current CEO of the former led Lidl digital division.

[deleted]
Post reply on HN