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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

#51

Post by 8organicbits »

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 finances work out in a couple ways. First, developers are expensive so productivity improvements on the cloud saves money and speeds delivery. Managed services (storage, queue, email, database) can have great productivity gains. This is also faster delivery or smaller team sizes. Why hire a sysadmin, db admin, etc when AWS has managed services that remove (or reduce) the need for those roles. Keep your headcount low and move fast.

The math is different for different companies, workloads, etc.

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

#52

Post by krab »

oblio wrote: post #30
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…

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.

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

#53

Post by chrisseaton »

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…

> 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.

Wouldn't be surprised if you have to fax in a request for a new instance.

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

#54

Post by geogra4 »

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 sad, even sap runs a lot on aws

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

#55

Post by Aperocky »

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…

Is it even a cloud without publicly accessible API?

instead of `aws ec2 run-instances` and 1000 other APIs that AWS expose, it looks like lidl just have `lidl contact-sales`

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

#56

Post by geogra4 »

radicalbyte wrote: post #14

The 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?

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

#57

Post by tluyben2 »

rmoriz wrote: post #4

IMHO too late. Software to run a PaaS was the key 10 years ago, the future is custom silicon and universal runtimes (either via linux containers and k8s or WASM). In both areas the barrier to enter is huge and costly. Common commodity hardware (think x86) will not provide enough competitive advantage especially in terms of energy efficiency. That said, I'm happy that someone at least tries to attack. All the best wis…

Custom silicon for what? AI training sure but what else? Most workloads outside that domain are fine with cheap ARM SoCs. Just call everything ‘compute units’ and deliver SDKs for common envs to package and deploy. No need to inform what you are running on.

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

#58

Post by logronoide »

oblio wrote: post #50
samwillis wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The history of the “Made in Germany” mark is really interesting. It was introduced by the British to discourage buying from Germany, and encourage people to buy British. Germany then very successfully twisted it around to be a mark of engineering expertise and quality - the perfect response. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Made_in_Germany

"Made in Japan" used to be an insult, too. Same for "Made in Korea". "Made in China" still is, I'd give that 20-30 years more to completely transition over.

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.

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

#59

Post by rndgermandude »

oblio wrote: post #24
machinekob wrote: post #11

It looks more like B2B cloud at least from past informations about it not sure about AWS rivality.

AWS is huge. The entire Lidl group made €57bn last year. Just AWS made about $62bn, so pretty much the same thing. And AWS is growing about 30% per year. More than that, AWS is just one piece of the pie. Azure supposedly made about $38bn last year, also growing by about 30% per year. Alibaba and GCP both made about $10bn and they're both growing at about the same pace as Azure and AWS. And I didn't even include IBM o…

>The entire Lidl group made €57bn last year. Just AWS made about $62bn, so pretty much the same thing.

While you have a point in general, I have no idea from where you got your numbers...

Lidl had revenue of 100.8bn EUR (~108bn USD) in 2021, the entire Schwarz Group of 133.6bn EUR [0].

>How much is Lidl actually investing in this?

Nitpicking, but Lidl isn't, Schwarz Group is. I suppose how much they will invest is a matter of how promising it will look. Remember that amazon started out selling books. ;)

I genuinely think that Schwarz Group has a real chance to become a player in the long run, at least in Europe, if they really try. If it happens, it will not happen quickly. But they seem to have the "company culture" to make it happen, the deep pockets to make it happen, the political connections too. They are however a new player in this "IT thing". They might as well end up scraping the idea again, or be content on just being a datacenter provider for colo for other EU deep pockets instead of offering the full range of AWS services.

[0] https://www.zeit.de/news/2022-05/19/schwarz-gruppe-steigert-...

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