Yeah, kind of. Lidl and Kaufland is owned by the Schwarz Group. They have been busy replicating the AWS orgin story. Their cloud is called StackIT. I've worked with them. Still some room to grow but a solid foundation. I like that competition is back on
Is it fully custom, or are they using a flavor of OpenStack or similar?
They have their own API but under the hood it's OpenStack.
Schwarz seems to be obsessed with how Amazon (book seller) created AWS and they are trying to do the same... with 5 people. Also Aleph Alpha + Cohere is a Lidl work as the current CEO of the former led Lidl digital division.
So the 7,500 they say they're employing...is not true?
Lidl is a grocery store chain, I'm assuming GP was talking about the amount of people actually working on the cloud.
Lidl has 375,000 employees. They have stated they employ 7,500 people in their digital services division.
Yeah, Lidl and Kaufland are store chains, with 14200 stores combined.
7500 employees is just Schwarz Digits, the digital services division.
Schwarz Gruppe includes Schwarz Digits, which include StackIT. 7500 is the number of employees at Digits, which also includes online marketplaces like Kaufland e-commerce, so definitely not all of them work on the sovereign cloud.
Lidl famously blew 500M on a failed SAP project, so they're understandably a bit into running things themselves.