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

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

#31

Post by emj » Sat, Jun 04, 2022, 1:17 PM UTC

asvitkine wrote: post #9

sschueller wrote: post #7

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…

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

When we are talking about cloud and digital services there is nothing protectionist about it. The amount of powers all countries spy agencies have over cloud platforms is scary.

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

#32

Post by oblio » Sat, Jun 04, 2022, 1:17 PM UTC

rmoriz wrote: post #27

helldritch wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, but the thing is, why would they switch away from AWS/Azure/... unless forced to by regulation? Existing cloud providers can scale to planet sized businesses.

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

#33

Post by rndgermandude » Sat, Jun 04, 2022, 1:17 PM UTC

logronoide wrote: post #5

Somebody should tell them “Made in Germany” may work for cars and capital goods, but not for tech. Too late.

Not to Germans it's not. Not to the EU countries in general, with GDPR compliance hovering over their heads, it's not.

The reputation when it comes to "tech" as in "IT" is not stellar for sure, but it's not unrecoverable bad, and you're forgetting political dimensions.

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

#34

Post by MontyCarloHall » Sat, Jun 04, 2022, 1:18 PM UTC

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.

The advantage is rapid burst scaling. Some businesses have workloads that only require a handful of small servers for most of the year, but for short periods of time require hundreds or even thousands of servers to process sudden workload bursts. Some examples:

* e-commerce sites around holidays; ticketing sites right before popular events

* internet fora that get sudden influxes of traffic (e.g. Reddit)

* scientific computing projects that occasionally require huge batch jobs using (hundreds of) thousands of cores [0]

You are correct that for the majority of businesses, whose workload requirements minimally and predictably fluctuate, cloud providers are a rip off. But for the few use cases actually requiring massive transient scaling, there is no viable alternative.

[0] https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/gcp/220000-cores-and-...

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

#35

Post by jotm » Sat, Jun 04, 2022, 1:18 PM UTC

sschueller wrote: post #7

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…

Phone call culture is real in Germany lol.

It's pretty maddening sometimes, I'd write emails that include everything they might need to know, yet they insist on calling back just to read the emails and confirm every point.

Like... why?

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

#36

Post by m00dy » Sat, Jun 04, 2022, 1:18 PM UTC

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 :(

Except for the pharmaceuticals. We still rely on the inventions that happened in WW2.

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

#37

Post by oblio » Sat, Jun 04, 2022, 1:19 PM UTC

holografix wrote: post #22

radicalbyte wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It's still not the same thing as not having that data, at all.

Once you have the encrypted data somewhere, and if you really need to, it's just a game of time. At some point the old encryption will be broken.

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

#38

Post by jotm » Sat, Jun 04, 2022, 1:20 PM UTC

logronoide wrote: post #5

Somebody should tell them “Made in Germany” may work for cars and capital goods, but not for tech. Too late.

It's never too late tbh, but in this case it makes zero sense. The competition is also "made in Germany", it's not like all the datacenters/providers are fully run from the US or something.

The only ones who would fall for this gimmick are the people who only buy "made in Germany" in Lidl, I guess?

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

#39

Post by arinlen » Sat, Jun 04, 2022, 1:20 PM UTC

sschueller wrote: post #7

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…

> 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.

For contrast, service providers like Hetzner (also a German company) let you provision cloud instances with a single click, and you can SSH into them immediately.

I have a few pet projects running as docker swarm stacks in Hetzner nodes, and the time it takes between provisioning instances from scratch and get everything installed, configured, up and running and serving production traffic with an Ansible playbook is measured in seconds.

In StackIT it takes longer to get your phonecall picked up by someone.

Nevertheless, this is an excellent step in the right direction. If the cloud is renting other people's computers, it makes no sense at all that there are so few people renting their own hardware (specially within the EU), and the ones that do charge a hefty premium.

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

#40

Post by MontyCarloHall » Sat, Jun 04, 2022, 1:20 PM UTC

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 :(

I wonder how much of this is due to the vast tech salary discrepancies (especially in areas like AI and cloud) between Europe and the US. I bet the Lidl cloud engineers are getting paid at most a third of their AWS counterparts. If you want AWS quality, you have to pay AWS salaries.