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Lidl to Launch Rival to AWS

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Re: Lidl to Launch Rival to AWS

#61

Post by speedgoose »

discodave wrote: post #48
speedgoose wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They will probably not attempt to compete against AWS on everything but focus on the core cloud technologies using off the shelf software and hardware. An alternative of EC2, S3, and ELB is already interesting and many companies provide that with fewer employees. No need to waste resources on products such as AWS Greengrass, or AWS Lumberyard, or even AWS EKS.

Just EC2 networking (VPC) is several hundred, maybe 1000 employees. My guess at the total headcount for EC2 would be several thousand employees. Source: worked as an engineer at Amazon, including EC2 for 5 years.

Some cloud providers have a lot fewer employees and are doing well. They don't have as many features compared to EC2 and VPC but it's not a major problem for them.

Re: Lidl to Launch Rival to AWS

#62

Post by discodave »

bigtones wrote: post #7

"The acquisition, which completed on May 1, brings 70 cloud specialists into the wider group”. For comparison, Amazon has 40,000 employees in AWS.

Looking up "Amazon Web Services" on LinkedIn, and going to the "people" tab gets you 50k people in 2020.

So maybe you're even underestimating!

Re: Lidl to Launch Rival to AWS

#63

Post by dna_polymerase »

Cu3PO42 wrote: post #16

I'm currently getting a 500 on the link. Here's [1] an alternative source, originally in German but put through Google Translate. There's three things to note there: it's not Lidl itself, but the parent company doing this, and the plans were announced late last year. Also they're building out the infrastructure for internal use first and are not necessarily looking to offer a cloud to customers, though they may work…

The Camao website/announcement is available in English: https://camao.one/blog/partnerschaft-schwarz-gruppe-heilbron...

Re: Lidl to Launch Rival to AWS

#64

Post by gbrindisi »

runj__ wrote: post #5

In Sweden Lidl is know for being suspiciously cheap, they're even playing on it in their ads here. They had a marketing stunt where a chef started a luxury pop-up restaurant and the payoff was that it was all Lidl ingredients. "You can cook good food EVEN though you're using Lidl stuff" I'm not 100% sure that's what I want of a cloud provider.

Sidenote: as an italian in Sweden I wouldn't dismiss so fast the quality of some stuff you can find in Lidl compared to Coop, Ica or Hemkop.

Lidl reputation as a brand has gone up for me since I moved here.

Re: Lidl to Launch Rival to AWS

#65

Post by discodave »

jonex wrote: post #13

I doubt the headline properly captures their intent, the article itself is very light on details, but this quote might shine some light at it: "Lidl’s parent company Schwarz Group is taking on Amazon by launching its own cloud computing service for third party retailers." My guess would be that they are not aiming to compete with AWS per se, rather to offer infrastructure and services for online stores, which could p…

Sounds more like Shopify maybe.

Re: Lidl to Launch Rival to AWS

#66

Post by mikorym »

cameronbrown wrote: post #42
gibolt wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely it can't be that many. And if it is, that has to include janitors at their data centers.

Sure it can. Also, a lot more engineers are required to take a product to market at a big corp than a startup.

If you look at the core technology only, then you often just need a handful of experts. It's all the rest that is the problem.

The REAPER DAW was written by one person. The initial Linux kernel was written by one person. cURL was written by one person and even your BMW uses it [1]. The original Skype was written by three programmers. The list goes on... Of course, you later get a lot of maintainers joining the projects. But you certainly don't need 40 000 programmers if you are not selling your product, or not selling it yet. And even then I think a lot of those jobs are, while they are useful for AWS, not part of the core development.

[1] https://curl.haxx.se/docs/companies.html

Re: Lidl to Launch Rival to AWS

#67

Post by Cu3PO42 »

dna_polymerase wrote: post #63
Cu3PO42 wrote: post #16

I'm currently getting a 500 on the link. Here's [1] an alternative source, originally in German but put through Google Translate. There's three things to note there: it's not Lidl itself, but the parent company doing this, and the plans were announced late last year. Also they're building out the infrastructure for internal use first and are not necessarily looking to offer a cloud to customers, though they may work…

The Camao website/announcement is available in English: https://camao.one/blog/partnerschaft-schwarz-gruppe-heilbron...

Thanks, I didn't release there was an anchor for the English version, I updated my link.

Re: Lidl to Launch Rival to AWS

#68

Post by megaframe »

I don't get how they plan to compete, do they have chip designers? or deals with SOC manufacturers because AWS/Google/Microsoft are fast because of custom chips that link NVMe directly to the NIC and skip the CPU and some of the network stack

Re: Lidl to Launch Rival to AWS

#69

Post by mikorym »

runj__ wrote: post #5

In Sweden Lidl is know for being suspiciously cheap, they're even playing on it in their ads here. They had a marketing stunt where a chef started a luxury pop-up restaurant and the payoff was that it was all Lidl ingredients. "You can cook good food EVEN though you're using Lidl stuff" I'm not 100% sure that's what I want of a cloud provider.

I come from an agricultural background and all of the farmers I know always get less than 50% of the price of what you pay in the supermarket. Change that 50% to >80% and you get Lidl and Aldi for the exact same produce.

I am not sure why it works like that. These days you get direct to supermarket more often (taking out Fresh Produce Markets) but again—it's not direct to consumer. Personally, I think it's more because of the retailers being cutthroats than any other reason.

Re: Lidl to Launch Rival to AWS

#70

Post by mschuster91 »

vertex-four wrote: post #25
estsauver wrote: post #8

I'm really confused why they think european data protection laws are likely to be a big barrier. I think Amazon is well poised to let you choose regions for things, and unless LIDL knows something we don't, will probably be able to adapt to almost any new regulations as well or as fast as Lidl could. I also wonder why I would trust LIDL to execute on a vital part of infrastructure for us, when they can't manage an SA…

American companies so far have been really bad at actually complying with regulations like the GDPR - many do on the surface level, but if you're a European company that wants to do things right and not take risks on the interpretation of things like "consent", suddenly your pool of potential third-party data processors drops significantly. There's a serious cultural issue there.

> There's a serious cultural issue there.

Said "cultural issue" is the reason why the GDPR was implemented in the first place! It was not European ad-tech running wild tracking people all over the place so hard that even the notoriously slow and complex EU parliament had no choice but to act in the interest of their constituents.

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