Stackit: Cloud and Colocation

"all of them require you to call someone/send a letter/FAX to create a VM."

Have ordered servers from Hetzner online for the last 20 years, since their cloud offering via API/cli.

Strange, I never had to send a single FAX in my life in germany. Especially not for any cloud offerings located in EU/germany. I would LOVE to see proof for that.

We've used Hetzner for years. We never called or faxed them. Great service, by the way.

This time is different: This is not backed by the govt or german telecom but by the richest German alive (> 50B net worth). I think (hope), the chances are much higher that he's in for the long run with an appropriate amount of ressources.

Had to send documents to substantiate the business location on account creation, but nothing asynchronous after that.

This may be due to unions. In one of my previous jobs we were providing a software for digital subscriptions to their news site. The plan was to also integrate with their SAP for offline subscriptions. We offered to do the integration in a way where a user would buy online and it would get inserted into their SAP via an API. This was a no go, since before they've had a couple of people doing this manually and they couldn't fire them due to unions so they decided we would be sending the orders for offline subscriptions to them and they'll physically enter it into SAP. I wish I was joking.

Strictly speaking, this is not Lidl (chain of grocery stores). Lidl is owned by the same parent company - Schwarz Gruppe, which has a pretty big digital branch with several companies focusing on different products (e-commerce, cloud infrastructure etc). StackIt is one of those companies. It is good to see one more local competitor to AWS backed by the largest retailer in Europe, who also uses those solutions for their own e-commerce projects.

Not sure how they plan to offer competitive prices.

"Electricity prices in Germany ranked amongst highest globally" (2021):

https://www.iamexpat.de/expat-info/german-expat-news/electri...

I don't know the answer to this question, but living in Germany and interacting with their products, I'd say they are pretty good at what they do -- for consumers. I don't use Amazon since years, but recently had to and was shocked that it's basically impossible to find anything, just hundreds of products and no way to filter through anything. Their competition is way ahead of them. So I don't know if this translates to IT / cloud / etc, but it's not like they are completely clueless.

And as others have noted it's not just Lidl, this group owns also Kaufland which also swallowed up another chain (Real) recently. So they are huge.

While the bureaucracy certainly applies to German government, companies here are no better and no worse than anywhere in the world.

If you have an example of a German IT company requiring a fax, please share, so I can mock my German co-workers ;)

Hetzner has entered the chat.

(They rock)

> Wasn't sure if April fools or not.

Wasn't sure if you were paying attention or not? [0]

What is wrong with having competition?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23151069

There are also PaaS providers in Germany, such as Fortrabbit for PHP, which do a great job. Competes with some parts of AWS.

Tried to use IBM Cloud, they wanted my passport for verification. Big nope.

can you name a few rivals?

i wonder btw... are you German? ;-)

There's plenty of EU-based companies they need to challenge before they can challenge AWS (Hetzner, OVH, Upcloud, Raptr..)

I don't see it happening, at least not with what they're showing.

I was an employee of the Kaufland IT back then, which then was integrated to the Schwarz IT some years ago. Only a small team worked on StackIt back then - it probably grew the last years, but most will not work on this.

I also don't think they will be a serious contendor to the current companies

Those Schwarz digital branches have the culture and structure that is not different from Berlin startups, only a bit more mature. I think they are capable.

Oracle's cloud also completes registration and provision by hand. Also, not everyone gets an account.

If they can get a decent traction, they can scale-up step by step. Rome didn't got built in a day.

Very German. Tech companies here don't like open signups. I have absolutely no idea why. Not a single SaaS startup I've worked for or have worked with here has had open signups.

The contact form mentions that they're only looking to serve enterprise customers right now, they probably want to prevent small accounts from swamping the system while they're working on expanding their availability.

Most likely they have a different enterprise sales pipeline for their target audience, e.g. EU Businesses.

Lidl are a big employer and I'm sure they're not perfect: I don't like the "others are worse" metric for arguing but unfortunately Lidl are consistently one of the better chains so it's hard to buy this.

It's also true that Amazon is consistently the worst employer in all areas including their AWS staff, where they are worried about (and I quote) "Burning through all competent human capital"[0] in certain parts of the world.

With those two factors (Lidl being above the baseline, amazon being below): your comment seems like FUD.

[0]: https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-warehouse-turnover-wo...

At least in the UK they are well known to pay well above average in the retail industry.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-59306232

Whereas I hear the pay at the Amazon fulfillment centers is really good???!

No idea what you are talking about. Here in Germany Corporate Lidl is paying fair, retail management on entry level is being paid way above average and even the retail employees are paid above competition (on the same level of Aldi).

Those traditional companies will never be able to compete with absurd FAANG salaries (that are obscene in my opinion anyway, but that is not the topic) due to the nature of the business. If this thing scales, however, then salaries could be higher.

Finally, I am living in Germany, I have worked for German companies. Many of us dont like the US, we dont like those American services, too. If there was a German alternative, even with a premium, we would pay that. It has to be competetive in functionality, but not necassarily in price.

Really? This is contrary to what I've heard from friends who've worked at Lidl. Admittedly my sample size is just 3 and all local to Finland, but over here Lidl seems to be regarded as a good employer, and when you factor in the various bonuses, they pay well above market rate.

Over here in Romania Lidl pays some of the best salaries in the retail market, the worst are the likes of Carrefour, Cora and I think Auchan, too. They also have an IT division in here, not sure what their relative pay is.

A close friend of mine works for the local Lidl division, she is part of the team that does internal communication and as such she has been directly involved in "marketing" compensation-related stuff and related perks to the company's employees and such. To me it does seem that Lidl, the company, tries to treat its employees as humanly as possible, which is saying something when it comes to the retail market.

> I think they'll have a hard time finding people to staff that, Lidl has a long history of underpaying and abusing their personnel

I don't know about the personnel abuse, but here in the UK Lidl employees are one of the better paid employees as far as groceries stores go.

EDIT: maybe I was thinking of Aldi, who, after a quick search, seems to pay significantly more than Lidl.

> I think they'll have a hard time finding people to staff that, Lidl has a long history of underpaying and abusing their personn

Not sure what branch you are refering to, but that's definitely not the case with their IT department. Their pay and benefits are well above market rate.

They have 150 employees. Like Amazon there's likely a difference how people at the frontline vs backend IT systems are treated.

Funny you say that and pick up Amazon as an example. Lidl is known for not treating retail workers the best, but still orders of magnitude better than Amazon treats their retail workers.

That being said, both are irrelevant, since it won't be the first company that treats retails workers like shit, while handling the IT workers like spoiled rock stars.

> Lidl has a long history of underpaying and abusing their personnel

So does Amazon?

Is there any evidence for that other than the scandal they had a decade or so ago? Maybe I missed it.

> I think they'll have a hard time finding people to staff that, Lidl has a long history of underpaying and abusing their personnel

Their store staff yes indeed, but they won't be able to get away with that for IT staff. The situation is similar to Amazon... those who are essentially disposable cogs get treated as such as far as the law allows (and in some cases even worse), the ones who can't be replaced get paid really well.

AWS is a direct competitor in retail market it's common for big companies not to chose AWS if they are in same business, with Microsoft Azure it's a bit different story as they are the IT company not like Amazon.

There's no comparison to the modern slavery happening at Amazon or Walmart.

"underpaying and abusing their personnel"

Amazon has the same...

Anything that hosts anything is seen as a "competitor to AWS" since some people are able to boil down AWS to a "cloud host". Admittedly they've grown to do much much more specific things, but one could argue that's the center of their offering.

Yes. If I remember right Schwarz Group doesn't use AWS because they don't want to give money and data to a big competitor, but that doesn't make their hosting setup an "AWS competitor". And as far as I can see the site also doesn't claim anything like that, so this is a clear case of "don't editorizalize titles!"

Well you have a kubernetes cluser + various dbs and message brokers. This is what 99% of clients actually use in AWS. It makes sense that exactly this is part of the minimum viable product.

To be honest it took some scrolling but it does seem to offer some cloud services like managed databases, elasticsearch, rabbitmq, redis, k8s - this is not just barebone VM host.

Nor do they appear to have actually launched.

BWS, cause if you're going for A you better be B?

Parkside services

I can guess why... Everybody would recall that cheap kitchen appliance that broke within the first month after purchase.

Dulani Web Services

Crusti Croc Colo.

Failures and problems with SAP integration are incredibly common, I would not be placing blame so hard on LIDL themselves. The root cause is usually that SAP goes for any new product / addon to whoever they feel the market leader is in the respective area, models their processes (usually without questioning them too much) and then packages this as a new product or addon.

New customers then have to either adapt their processes to the process of the "market leader" (no matter if they are fit or not for the purpose or are actually efficient) or they have to adapt the SAP workflows - and that is where it gets hairy as fuck and where the problems arise:

- ABAP programmers are low in supply and high in demand (as the role requires both DBA and general coding skills as well as a ton of SAP-specific knowledge and the patience to deal with the bullshit that is the SAP UI)

- add to that that most people buy SAP skills from third party consultants with all the bullshit that comes with that (inadequate oversight, juniors being sold as seniors, near- and offshoring with timezone and language differences as well as cultural differences)

- the further you deviate from the SAP-prepackaged process the harder any patch or heaven forbid major update becomes. If you fuck it up badly enough you are just finished with releasing the last patch and then you already are in crunch mode again for the next patch.

In my opinion and experience SAP is only relevant these days because of lock-in and "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" effect and because they are relatively quick at implementing law changes as code, not because the people who actually have to use it want to use it - quite to the contrary. And, speaking as a German, the fact that this company is just about the only major IT company that Germany has is both extremely sad and exemplary for German IT importance in general at the same time.

To be honest, Lidl is far from the only company with a failed billion-dollar SAP implementation. In recent years this is becoming the standard.

Failed is not the correct description, more like top management began to realize the longterm effects such a big SAP-integration would have on their processes, changed their mind against it and reversed their direction. Don't blame them for acting and axing such a huge project

“So now what do we do with all those programmers we hired for the ERP project?”

“I have an idea…”

I'm confused. The newsworthy part is the value?

I bet their "internal customers" is mostly their bottom of the barrel kaufland.de marketplace.

You are probably right, but on the other hand, correct English or not, anyone who cares will read "blah, blah, blah, skip, skip, skip, where are the actual specs?".

This goes beyond a nitpick into reactionaryism, in my opinion.

I am a native English speaker who has lived and worked in many countries around the world. In some of those countries English was the primary language, in others it was formalized in the workplace as the business language, in others it was just a lingua franca used by immigrants and expats of many different backgrounds to communicate with one another. One of the best things about English is that it easily adapts to all these roles. It's a flexible language, and there are many different ways to express the same thing. I believe that's one of the reasons why it is so popular as a second language.

English as it is spoken in the professional sphere in Germany is different to the English as it is spoken in the professional sphere in the US or Canada or England or Australia, and that's fine. Ditto India, Singapore, Philippines, South Africa... Unlike Spanish, French, Chinese etc there is no central regulator that defines how the English language is supposed to be used. Grammar can change depending on where you are. English speakers all over the world essentially understand one another, despite using different structures and idioms.

While it is true that completely bastardized grammar can become more difficult to understand, and may result in the language being spoken getting classified more as a pidgin or creole, I don't think it's especially helpful to "nitpick" over this particular issue - a sentence structure that is easily understandable by anyone in the world who can speak English. If "do" gets dropped by English language speakers in the context of questions, what's the big deal? Especially in written language where we use a question mark anyway. Who cares?

> international mindset

The international mindset is to be tolerant with non-native speakers. I find it perfectly ok when a German company uses expressions that hint at their origin. Similarly, I'm not bothered when a British company uses British words or a Texas company uses expressions that are typical for their region.

What triggers me, however, is when people misspell expressions in ways that reveal that they have no clue about where the expression comes from. For example, if someone tries to sound smart by using the latin expression "per se" but actually spells it "per say", that reveals to me that they are probably not as educated as they want to appear.

As a student of both German and English, this mistake looks weird to me, as you are supposed to start the question with the verb in German (Brauchst du ...?), and this acts as a pretty good reminder to translate the question with the do in English.

I understand where you're coming from - that companies of this size should be able to afford native English translators, especially if they're internationally facing.

But I think that most people (in the international business community) don't notice the details your talking about, so in the end, it really doesn't make sense to pay for a translator. I live in Germany, and even my most brilliant German friends (with basically native English skills) cannot grasp the subtle differences of when to use "this", "that", or "it" (as in, "this one time at band camp" vs "that one time at band camp", "it's awesome" vs "that's awesome" vs "this is awesome"). It's a dead give away, but almost nobody would ever know except native speakers.

> Edit: I also see this all the time in Email correspondence, you can immediately tell if a person is a native German speaker because they don't capitalize the first letter in an English email after "Dear X, we are writing <blah>"

I don’t get it, which part is supposed to be capitalized, “dear” or “we”? As a native English speaker the sentence looks correct as it’s written. Or maybe I have bad attention to detail.

> I also see this all the time in Email correspondence, you can immediately tell if a person is a native German speaker because they don't capitalize the first letter in an English email after "Dear X, we are writing <blah>" (which would be 100% correct in German, but somehow no one teaches this in English classes in Germany that in English it is capitalized).

TIL thanks.

Sadly once you are in the professional world, nobody correct you anymore, so you can't improve/fix your English easily.

You are talking up an 'international mindset', but what you are writing here goes against that. They are not writing native english. They are writing ESL. A true international mindset is accepting that the english the people of the world write to each other is not the same english as british people speak.

Would you also have corrected it if had been text written by Nigerians or others that use a creole or dialect of english?

Customers have hunger for German copy-writing!

>you can immediately tell if a person is a native German speaker because they don't capitalize the first letter in an English email

Pretty bold claim. I bet there are many other languages where the first letter after the salutation isn't capitalized.

I also bet that some native english speakers make the same error.

The copy is fine; English does not need to written by native speakers - that is a completely distorted definition of “international mindset”.

There's also the cookie prompt (yes, headline in capitals)

> BEFORE GOING ANY FURTHER: BRIEFLY ABOUT THE PROCESSING OF YOUR DATA

But... that said, as someone who's only done a bit of German on Duolingo, I don't mind, especially for early-stage services. It says to me more work needs to be done around l10n and copywriting, but as long as they keep improving the core product, it's okay.

In fact what annoys me more than awkward English are teams that download and use generic English-language website templates, resulting in super-generic product pages.

Being international minded and being an anglosphere slave are completely orthogonal vectors

> STOP translating directly from German

Is this an option in German business culture? Are Germans open to conveying the (mere) gist of a sentence?

Ages ago, we translated our manufacturing software to German. Our German team were an absolute joy to work with. They were so thorough, they'd correct our English, and then translate to German. In other words, our German translators caught mistakes missed by our own technical writers. So awesome.

I'm not sure the reverse is even possible, culturally. Can a German marketing and PR firm accept a localized version of their message? Off the top of my head, I can't think of a German lifestyle product or consumer brand. And the German brands I do know -- BMW, Mercedes, Kraftwerk -- don't much use words for marketing. They don't need to.

You have probably not experienced i18n of american websites

> (...) these little details would go a long way to actually showing that the German economy does have some sort of international mindset (...)

Well, I think that Germany's commercial balance shows this much better than non-native-sounding-yet-fully-correct grammar.

No, you did the right thing by ranting. You both shared some knowledge about contemporary German commerce with us and gave the company some constructive feedback for its marketing website. You're on to something here.

What if customers that are extremely sensitive to grammar rules end up being very expensive customers to keep happy? Filtering them out on the front end might be a great business move.

I imagine something like "Our customer support is being overworked by completely banal minutiae, what can we do?" We compare different intake funnels, and customers that were presented with a badly translated homepage never reach to support with such issues. Let's make sure to always run that page from now on, those customers aren't worth the hassle. Make sure they stick with AWS and bleed them dry.

Nothing odd about it. You pointed out a lack of attention to detail. I’m guessing one will find other areas of their product that show a similar lack of detail and attention.

I absolutely loved this comment. I feel total empathy not specifically with the topic, but for how you feel. I moved back to my home country (not DE) after 10years abroad and oh man, those thoughts are constantly with me. I'm doing an effort to readapt and hope it works well.

I totally empathize.

When American websites are translated to other languages, sometimes some things end up weird.

By the way, I feel Indians speak that way in casual conversations; "you want coffee?", "you want biscuit?" etc.

I feel like the other way around it's also pretty bad, if not worse. Technical things written in, or translated to, German sound so boring and stiff that you want to immediately run away.

> This may sound like a rant, but I genuinely think these little details would go a long way to actually showing that the German economy does have some sort of international mindset.

Except it doesn’t.

I think you're onto something. So often, Germans think they know English and don't bother to have a native speaker proof-read their copy.

Do they intend to attract US interest? When I see a country specific TLD, I automatically assume that the company is focused on a specific region.

I'll nitpick further and say that the grammar is actually perfectly valid.. You don't believe me ?

The Aisle of Shame, at least for Aldi.

I also worked with people from Schwarz and some smaller company who manages some business data. It's going to be a disaster. I'm not even surprised that you need to 'Get in touch'. They do pretty many things manually and simply wrong. Client is processing large Excel file for 4 days? Somebody simply kills the job and the whole process starts again. Big words, cheap execution.

> it took them over 3 months to even get any credentials for VPN, let alone repositories.

What you're saying is, you can just join, get paid, and do nothing? Where do I sign up?

i mean right now one can't even sign up properly. but obviously since they want to compete on a platform level as opposed to whatever you were doing for them, surely "not being able to create an account" isn't gonna draw users away from gcp/aws.

..and when you are a customer there you know that you are core business and not just on some service that might be ended any day due to some strategic coin flip. I have no idea how these sidecar business ever establish themselves in terms of trust (same certainly applies to early years AWS)

And this is really more positioned as a rival to Hetzner than to AWS, for now.

Most of these AWS alternatives seem to be based on OpenStack, and there are many hosters around the world who offer the AWS services most people use. EC2+S3+EBS+load balancing is all most businesses probably need. Add some mid-2000s style hosted databases and you're probably set up. Truthfully, most businesses don't even need all that, but modern development practices tend not to care too much about efficiency.

All you really need to start competing with AWS is a data center and a shiny dashboard. They already had the data center for their own use, so extending it to provide IT services is quite a logical next step.

Granted, STACKIT isn't as complete an offering like Open Telekom Cloud, but it's close enough to matter.

I don't know what the status is now, but back when I was working for IBM, their Bluemix offering demonstrated a complete lack of commitment to operational excellence with seemingly routine downtime, with an undercurrent of "It's 1700, time to sod off for the day" regardless of the state of their service.

It also didn't help that they seemed intent on paying 35+% less than other competing tech companies.

I thought that AWS was "a boring data center with some software on top of it"?

Embarrassing "We are STACKT" typo right in the middle of the page, too.

The Royal Society For Putting Things On Top of Other Things approves of STACKIT!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFrdqQZ8FFc

> The Schwarz Group covers the entire value chain of the food trade like no other trading company, from production to sales to materials management. Digitalization and its pressure to change are noticeable in all business areas. To continue to successfully serve rising customer needs, new digital business models must be iterated even faster – and this while the data and system infrastructure becomes increasingly complex. As the number 1 in the European retail business, the Schwarz Group knows that those who do not digitize will lose market share in the long term.

Lidl are part of the Schwarz Group.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwarz_Gruppe is the parent of Lidl. And the Schwarz IT business group runs StackIT. There is also Schwarz Mobility for fleet management of company cars. I don't think it's meant to be associated with the Lidl brand.

"STACKIT is the digital brand of Schwarz IT and therefore part of the IT organisation of one of the world’s largest retail groups. The Schwarz Group consists of the well-known brands Lidl and Kaufland, as well as Schwarz Produktion and waste and recycling management companies."

it says so at the bottom of the page:

"The Schwarz Group consists of the well-known brands Lidl and Kaufland, as well as Schwarz Produktion and waste and recycling management companies."

Yeah, Lidl and Kaufland.. kind of absurd, just like amazon launching computer infrastructure project.

Right now this is just a marketing page with no way to create an account.

> the title, which is a bit click-baity ...

My bad, I took the title from this thread¹ from 2 years ago which mentions that Lidl is planning to launch AWS competitor.

You are correct about German companies distrusting mainstream cloud providers. I guess the target audience for Stackit is mostly those German Mittelstands. I work with German corps and they would definitely have a mainstream provider with someone reliable like Lidl as a backer. In once case we found out the Google Analytics is storing the data in US centers by default and that made a lot of people deeply unhappy. I do have doubts that they might fall short of delivering their goal, but it is indeed an interesting development.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23151069

With GDPR, it is seemingly illegal to host anything in the US, though (or anything with PII) - so that is one (forced) upside to these types of services.

Ovh and hetzner have existed for ages. And you can actually purchase services from them.

No. Because:

1) AWS has very serious regulatory capture in Europe - e.g. for banking, government, possibly else it is the only one approved solution.

2) Those pension-fund owned German enterprises are legendary bad at IT. The best way you could describe the culture there is anti-agile & anti-meritocratic.

Lately I would consider myself lucky to find a bag of potatoes at Lidl. In the US at least they seem to be struggling to keep shelves stocked. I have 2 Lidl locations within 15 minutes of me and for the last few months the shelves have been pretty bare at both. To fill them up they have started stocking many more name brands which are not priced competitively with other grocery stores.

I understand there are currently supply issues but the Aldi across the street from one of the Lidl locations isn't having this severe of an issue. The traditional grocery store chains in the area also don't seem to be having anywhere near the same level of supply issues even for their store brands.