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Lidl to Launch Rival to AWS

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Re: Lidl to Launch Rival to AWS

#141
post #136

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…

Also, at least German companies really don't like uploading data to US servers.

I'm American and at this point I don't really like uploading data to US servers. I can totally understand the sentiment.

Re: Lidl to Launch Rival to AWS

#142

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…

>> For a cloud provider, negotiating deals now when AMD is on the rise must be perfect. The prime factor driving negotiations is volume. It is going to be hard to beat AWS on this front. >> Beating AWS on EC2 pricing is easy. AWS EC2 pricing is insanely expensive. This is simply not true. Taking into account everything you get with EC2 it is in par with other providers. Factors: - multiple (redundant) tier1 networkin…

Almost all decent datacentres and compute providers have these features, and it's far from unusual to have downtime in an EC2 reigion to the point where the standard advice is to spread across multiple reigions to avoid being caught out. EC2 does not have DDOS protection as standard its an additional cost service (AWS Shield). They will just charge you an insane ammount for the DDOS bandwidth as standard.

Linode, DO etc all have these features at a fraction of the price.

Re: Lidl to Launch Rival to AWS

#143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And Lidl/Schwarz especially has a strict No-Amazon-Policy. They see Amazon as a competitor, so if you want to work with them on a corporate level, you must not use AWS to process or store anything relating to their business. They do make exceptions, but you better be prepared to make a hell of a case for your product for them to reach up to upper management and ask for an exception to buy your services. And it makes…

I still think it's weird that companies think this helps anything. AWS isn't the same as the Amazon shop. Yes it shares the name and if you go enough levels above management you end up with Bezos but other than that their computers != their shop. Sometimes people then point to the fact that it's still a US company but ironically people try to make that point on their US-created computers using websites on a US-owned…

Amazon said (to Congress, no less) that it does not let it's own team responsible to deciding on which products to buy & sell access confidential sales reports of third party sellers that use their platform. And then it was revealed that they regularly do get access to these information.

There's no reasonable expectation that Amazon will not use any data it can easily access to make decisions.

I don't find that your argument regarding "using US created computers" and "US-owned gTLD" holds water. It's very hard to build e.g. CPUs that will contain very advanced backdoors that are totally hidden but can easily be targeted remotely to gather information, and the same goes for secretly using a domain. Additionally, the cost of doing so is astronomically high: the total loss of trust in US chip makers and internet companies. They may very well do that during major wars, but not to steal some company secrets.

On the other hand, it's easy for Amazon to siphon off data from AWS and even just using meta data (e.g. looking at how and when a customer scales to what size) gives you valuable insight into their business. And if they get caught? A few politicians will be annoyed, a few media articles (but hey, they may overshadow reports on unionization, so it's not all bad) and potentially a few companies leaving their platform, while others will undoubtedly say "I have nothing to hide from Amazon, so what?"

In other words the threat model is dramatically different.

Re: Lidl to Launch Rival to AWS

#145

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 is more than twice as slow than a $10/mo 'traditional' VPS instance.

Re: Lidl to Launch Rival to AWS

#146

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…

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

Re: Lidl to Launch Rival to AWS

#147

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…

What I really liked about Hetzner is that they provide VirtIO drivers so you can install Windows.

Re: Lidl to Launch Rival to AWS

#148
post #106

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…

Right. Plus, let's not forget the legal implications for the companies that will be able to keep their data within Europe.

What legal implications? AWS customers can choose to keep user data wholly within the EU regions, or they can transfer data freely between EU and US regions thanks to Amazon's certification under the EU-US Privacy Shield framework.

One of the great strengths of AWS is their phenomenal compliance department - whatever regulations you're subject to, AWS offer tools, guidance and support to help you maintain compliance. That's one of many, many reasons why AWS is simply incomparable with cheaper cloud offerings from smaller providers.

https://aws.amazon.com/compliance/programs/

Re: Lidl to Launch Rival to AWS

#149

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…

We host a lot of our infrastructure on Hetzner Cloud and are very happy, but to be fair it's a long long shot away from what AWS offers. You basically only have compute, storage and networking, only three datacenters and two regions to choose from and no managed services at all. You also can't do advanced networking like announcing your own IP addresses (Hetzner only allows that in colocation). You also only have a f…

> RAM maxing out at 32 GB

This part is just not accurate. I'm running their dedicated server with 256 GiB RAM right now.

Re: Lidl to Launch Rival to AWS

#150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't they have the same situation with LIDL? LIDL is also a (very) successful retailer, other retailers would have little incentive of helping them make more money. Also, I'm quite surprised about this announcement. I knew LIDL was in a really good position, but to attempt to compete in the cloud market is impressive. Good luck to them.

Maybe, but it's not the "biggest natural predator" the one so big it already started to squeeze you out of your habitat by sheer quasi-monopoly power. Lidl is easier to keep in check. For at least WalMart (it's happening in Europe) and Aldi a fighting them on their home turf.

Last time Walmart tried to get a position in germany they just failed outright, nobody accepted the Walmart shopping culture here, not even the employees.
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