Lidl’s parent company launches cloud unit to offer ‘Made in Germany’ AWS rival
datacenterdynamics.com
datacenterdynamics.com
They claim they are the German AWS when they miss the first thing that Bezos did at Amazon. He removed the barrier of entry to the max. He realized that people do impulse buying and the easier it is to do this the more business you get. Does anyone remember 1-click? I am sure a I have quit out of a purchase a hundred or more times at random vendors when I ended up having to create an account to just find out how much shipping is.
I had to order some custom laser cut metal parts. There are hundreds of companies offering this in Switzerland but almost all require a call for quote. The one company that let me upload my Fusion 360 file and give me an instant quote is the one I went with even if it cost more because I don't have the time to write 10 companies and send each one of them a CAD file having to explain what I want for such a limited run.
That bullshit caused us a huge amount of headaches when we wanted to deploy our COVID systems to Azure...
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.
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 on some trial account or with a $10 provisioning spend as part of a few hours long Jira ticket on a Friday afternoon.
By inserting humans in the middle of this process (and the delay and back-and-forth which is incurred from having to formally give all that company information and implementation planning information and have it vetted) they're going to turn off a really significant number of potentially lucrative clients who will go elsewhere because they don't have to mess around with humans until they're sure of what they want.
How many of the startups you have in mind didn't switch their infra once they grew? I know not a single one.
Calling Stackit an "AWS competitor" is most likely just editorialization by the 3rd party media.
The target customer are companies which are just barely moving away from self-hosted hardware.
On top of obvious reason everybody knows damn too well - any US 3-letter agency doesn't give a nanofraction of a f*k about privacy and will use any data to gain any advantage, and specifically treats non US-citizens as subhumans when it comes to several human rights. Geolocation is only theoretical guarantee when stakes are so high.
Some are OK with that, some are not.
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".
Not sure what are their IT needs, but I guess the larger SMEs are the target market for this service.
I'd argue that SMEs are the ideal market for cloud services.
Small shops with even smaller teams comprised of jack-of-all-trades are willing to pay a hefty premium for managed services that allow their teams for get things done without having to do everything themselves.
Once your company grows beyond the definition of a SME, its able to roll their own infrastructure and do their thing in more cost-effective ways that don't involve handing over their core business to external and even foreign companies.
Eventually the few devs left get "sold" to the contracting company, with the architects left as management for the contractors.
Have seen this happening already several times since 2007.
Usually it boils down to escalations where management gets some goodies from the offshore agency and then everything is good again, from management point of view, naturally.
(disclaimer, worked as a contractor)
Everything wrong with EU/German tech industry and why it will never catch up to the US, in a nutshell basically.
7 clicks? I count a single click to basic prices and two clicks to full pdf pricelist?
https://www.stackit.de/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/220601_STA...
Let's see what happens in 6-12 months.
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?
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.
Wouldn't be surprised if you have to fax in a request for a new instance.
instead of `aws ec2 run-instances` and 1000 other APIs that AWS expose, it looks like lidl just have `lidl contact-sales`
Those providers usually strictly target the B2B sector, with a focus on small to medium companies which only now start to do "digitalization". They usually still run with old-fashioned IT departments and certainly no budget to hire a full DevOps department with experienced senior developers.
For that reason, the German providers usually don't focus on scale and automation as the support burden is rather high. Hosting in Germany, and being compliant by default with many data protection rules is a big plus for inexperienced customers. But I imagine, this also leads to high customer retention due to de-facto lock-in.
Note that the article says that they are using a "proprietary" cloud platform. In my experience, in Germany "Cloud" is still a very ill-defined marketing term. It might well be possible that the "Cloud" just means that you can use a WYSIWYG interface to provision Linux VM templates (see for example the IONOS "Data Center Designer").
I had to look at the "Stackit" homepage itself to confirm that they are indeed hosting a Kubernetes based PaaS. But they indeed seem to focus on dynamic VM-Hosting and even colocation. They even mention SAP hosting!
In the past, United Internet, Deutsche Telekom and some others had a hosted e-mail offering branded as "Internet made in Germany" for similar reasons.
Another company of the "Internet made in Germany" group is Strato. They started with website and shop builders, and now make a lot of money essentially offering hosted Owncloud/Seafile services. Usually those are also marketed as a "Cloud" offering.
This makes me shudder just thinking about this, knowing how bad internet in Germany is, falling behind countries like Romania and Ukraine by several leagues.
Back in 2010 when I used to live in Berlin we found it almost fun and cute how there was bad internet, poor mobile coverage, and no credit cards accepted.
It was fun to return in 2020 and experience the exact same thing again
Aws was spun out from a successful large scale online retailer. What are lidl thinking?
In the US they have an online catalog and even in/out of stock indicators for your store. Lidl is now my preferred grocer outside for standard items while I use higher end grocers primary for their meat departments that have better cuts of meat available. Their produce is great although if you need a speciality item you likely won't find it. Their bakery is top notch compared to most US store bakeries.
They've always offered household items but I've noticed this expanding at my local store beyond toiletries and disposables, things like clothes and what not. I can't say I ever considered buying power tools or anything I'd want to keep and use long term there (I tend not to go discount for such items and opt for higher quality). There are places like Home Depot close and accessible enough here in the US that I doubt most would buy such products there. They do offer some plants on the cheap, although I'm not a plant person.
It's linked from here: https://www.stackit.de/en/prices
https://www.stackit.de/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/220601_STA...
I got to it via top menu -> prices -> scroll down a fair amount -> "to the price list" (in a yellow box)
Maybe latter on this thing will do AWS-style provisioning and services, but right now that doesn't even seem to be a current goal.
>They claim they are the German AWS
I see some media claim their are that, but it doesn't look like they themselves make that claim.
In order to access the really competitive pricing (to running the cloud yourself) on AWS, you have to do the same. As in, many of the bigger AWS users have deals with Amazon to get sometimes massive reductions in price, but they are custom negotiated between humans, not something you'd find on a website. The smaller AWS customers, those using the public prices, pay way more than what the service is worth.
but maybe it’s just some marketing BS
He found it when he was investigating a customer complaint about corrupted log file downloads.
There is still in-depth high-value engineering happening, even if you don't work for the flashy silicon valley VC unicorns.
In fact, such a basic support request would probably have been closed as "could not reproduce" in a highly competitive environment.
Compare this to the US and their population of 300 Million people and how influential US culture is in the world and how many people speak English. A US company has a potential market of 300 Million people and use that to support your expansion into smaller markets later.
There are probably other factors in play here but it's not surprising to me that Europe didn't produce a Microsoft, Google or an Apple.
Let me list some:
* Teamviewer: used to be more famous in the past but it is still a known brand to people world wide
* Cherry: more of a hardware thing, but they are known world-wide for their MX switches
* Deepl: a xoogler founded startup that is better than Google translate
* Soundcloud: well known all over the world, was founded in Berlin
* Suse: founded in the 90s and had steady growth since
* SAP: world leader in ERP software. Seriously people underestimate how well entrenched they are.
In the last two years, three of these companies had IPOs, two of them as unicorns. Sure, its is dwarfed by the US tech Cloud/AI/software sector but there are certainly world wide players from germany in the digital industry.
US produces more unicorns per year that Germany managed in 20 years
- a proper vision
- the balls to implement it, even if that means booting lobbyists off and annoying the US
We have OVH, Hetzner, Infomaniak, Proton, Nextcloud, and plenty of smaller companies, some heavily invested in open source. There's also a mechanism to fund flagship projects with billions.
In my experience with government organizations, the argument that public tax money should be used for public/free re-usable software instead of funding proprietary development (essentially subsidizing R&D of foreign corporations), really strikes a nerve on all administrative levels.
Good luck breaking into this space with the "Call for pricing" mentality mentioned in the comments.
It really feels like these cloud platforms are following the Microtransaction model of mobile games.
Code, you know, version control, diffs, CI/CD pipelines, inherent live "documentation" (up to a point, of course you won't know the "why", but you'll know most of the "how" and "what", git offering the "who").
I encounter 10-10000x higher bills on aws ; most 0s are self inflicted but the last few 0s I don’t think you can erase in the same way with aws vs a good vps provider.
I recently discovered our logging was costing $3,000/mo at GCP. For freaking logs.
And was there some sort of processing thing running on those logs? You'd have to pay for that compute.
But it's also got me thinking I'm going to buy a bunch of GPUs this month and stand up our own ML compute cluster.
We'll still run CRUD in the cloud, but I'm getting sick of paying for cloud GPUs. The GKE / GPU interface leaves tons of spare compute on the table anyway.
* 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-...
The math is different for different companies, workloads, etc.
You get them for the myriad of other managed services they provide, which let you build stuff that would otherwise take months, in days. The catalogue of AWS services is probably over 200 already, EC2 is just one of them.
Building on a cloud like that is much more "gluing together legos using Terraform and some code" than the alternative.
Configuring and maintaining open source solutions is a lot of work. Building everything yourself is too. I prefer to pay for AWS instead.
For some random raw EC2 server? Zilch. Zero. EC2 isn't really worth it by itself.
But EC2 isn't the only thing AWS has. Devs are pretty expensive. If you just need to run some random code in the cloud, futzing with a server somewhere for a couple hours making sure it's compliant with all of the enterprise standards costs many hundreds of dollars in dev pay. Lambda just works, and has a free tier. Setting up a proper queuing system is annoying and takes a few hours to do right. That's another couple hundred dollars. SQS is reasonably good and you can have that dev go do other things instead.
These things start to add up fast, and when you do everything yourself, you start to end up with thousands of dollars per month in maintenance costs. You can absolutely do that with AWS as well, but the goal is usually to just let AWS take care of that and have your employees do something that's actually valuable to the business (usually implementing proprietary business logic, which neither AWS nor Hetzner will do for you).
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 wishes, I'll be happy once proven wrong.
Too late.
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.
I understand the urge to look for something to find pride in somewhere but aiding regulation isn’t something normal people are aware of, never mind proud of.
> 4/ So the panel discussion turned to "What should the EU do?"
> And the more or less unanimous conclusion (except for the entrepreneur) was "We are going to build on the success of GDPR and aim to be the REGULATORY LEADER of machine learning"
> I literally laughed out loud
https://twitter.com/punk6529/status/1509832361449504770?s=20...
However, that's not even what Schwarz is targeting here. They are targeting the IT departments of existing companies that aren't necessarily in the tech space at all. I know of a bunch of companies who'd love to move a lot of their stuff into a managed cloud, but wouldn't touch a US-owned cloud for compliance reasons. They stay aware from Telekom, because... well... Telekom. They stay away from Hetzner because Hetzner is not considered "serious" enough for now. So they often end up running their own infra or at most do unmanaged colo.
The GDPR I do like, and are a bit prideful that the EU made it happen.
But it isn't about pride here so much anyway, as it is about political and regulatory realities.
Schwarz has to convince their potential customers that they are "serious" (and Schwarz is considered pretty serious in the business space), that they can execute on promises (and Schwarz again has a reputation for that too, though in the retail space) and that they can offer a cloud that is compliant with regulations, even if at first it's not much more than some managed vms/colos.
This is just giving up. AWS and the also rans are better at everything than companies whose executives play golf well, the serious companies you speak of. If the business plan is to target businesses that aren’t really in software and they don’t plan to have customers who are growing fast either what’s the point?
Is their business plan really to be IBM for the cloud, but German?
There are plenty of corporations in Germany that chug along since generation with essentially no profits on their balance sheets.
As long as salaries are paid, you provide a living for your employees, as long as customers are happy, you provide value to the economy. When you have your established niche you do not need growth.
The only ones who would fall for this gimmick are the people who only buy "made in Germany" in Lidl, I guess?
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.
Same for "Made in Korea".
"Made in China" still is, I'd give that 20-30 years more to completely transition over.
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.
Full price list has no pricing for ingress/egress. None whatsoever. For anything.
None of the basic pricing looks particularly competitive, but if that isn't an omission then that could be interesting
[1]: Another one is gridscale.io, also from Germany
These seem implausibly small for the total footprint of an entire datacenter designed for providing resources on par with an AWS zone. Perhaps these figures are referring to the maximum collocation space available to a single client?
Sort of like a kids bike is a competitor for a truck.
The Schwarz Group (Lidl's parent, as well as Kaufland's parent) is the largest privately held company in Germany and the largest retailer in the EU. While it's not owned by the Schwarz brothers anymore, as they have died, they transferred their ownership into a "non-profit" "charitable" foundation upon death. The foundation itself is in turn controlled by other foundations, which are then controlled by a mix of family members and hired trustees. Selling this is virtually impossible, as everybody would have to agree.
While Schwarz is small compared to Amazon (~143 billion USD vs ~470 billion USD in 2021 revenue), they aren't exactly a lightweight either. Look what "tiny" twitter (barely over 1 billion USD in revenue) is gonna cost a Musk...
Maybe at some point Schwarz might sell off just the cloud stuff. But if it's gonna be profitable they are unlikely to. And it's likely profitable or close to it from day one, as they already did most the hard work to support their internal IT needs. And they are a big name brand around here, known to do things "right" in their space (unlike e.g. Telekom/T-Systems) and a lot of German and European players have been looking at GDPR-compliant EU-based alternatives to AWS for quite a while.
Whatever it is I wouldnt really want to trust my infrastructure and data to a food retailer on their first attempt at providing IT services. That sentance should be enough warning.
I would trust the CERN much more than GAIA-X and this Lidl cloud to become an european alternative to AWS, Azure and GCP.
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..
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 or Oracle.
How much is Lidl actually investing in this? A few billions, at most?
I'd love to be proven wrong and I definitely think Europe needs at least a few top notch cloud providers, but it's going to be an uphill battle.
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-...
Even the tsystems cloud was / is shit and now they think they can just do it?
There is literally all kinds of mirrored services (from Dropbox to now apparently this, AWS) in Germany, in case one feels paranoid about respecting local privacy legislations (ie GDPR) and feeling that no foreign government/court order (possibly with a gag order for anyone to ever know) compromises the data.