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 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.
> 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.
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.
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 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.
>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
7 clicks? I count a single click to basic prices and two clicks to full pdf pricelist?
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.
> 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.
At the beginning, then they hire the likes of HCL, Infosys, Wipro, TCS,.... because IT isn't their core business, and C levels see it as a cost center and distraction.
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.
The irony is that a lot of the consulting shops that specialize in assisting the mittelstand are utterly horrendous money pits. In my capacity as CTO for a german mittelstand company I have had to fire over 80% of the consulting shops i worked with for either blatant incompetence (developing a plugin that fits none of the design document, deploying it straight to production and in the process blowing up the entire API) or insane overcharging (24 hours of billed work for an adjustment that took me less than an hour of time to reimplement when the next update inevitably broke their adjustment). Everyone else I have talked to in the field has had similar experiences, with truly positive experiences being very rare, yet all the owners I talk to refuse to hire qualified in-house staff because the prospect of paying 60k+ for a SWE is unthinkable.
Sounds like a halfway house of getting good working relations with contractors (as individuals not companies) might be a way out of this. I mean a working relationship, not just one based entirely on pay.
I have been doing consulting in Germany since 2007, after the Nokia sites in Germany went bust.
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.
I guess Lidl targets German Mittelstand and DAX40 companies that already have outsourced to other cloud vendors or are in trouble with their legacy infrastructure.
How many of the startups you have in mind didn't switch their infra once they grew? I know not a single one.
Yeah, but the thing is, why would they switch away from AWS/Azure/... unless forced to by regulation? Existing cloud providers can scale to planet sized businesses.
The press releases by the Schwarz Group never even mention AWS, only indirectly by pointing out "digital sovereignty" when using a Germany-based company instead of a "foreign cloud hoster".
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.
Same reasons some folks in US have US-first mentality.
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.
I am going to start working for one of those German cloud providers (not Schwarz Group) next month.
As far as I understand so far, the barrier-to-entry is actually a feature.
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
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.
> 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.
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.
This service isn't for you. At least not for now. This service right now is for already big companies, probably non-IT ones, looking to outsource their datacenter needs, in a GDPR compliant manner, and looking to do more "digital" in the future. These kinds of players do not look for one-click solutions, they are looking for actual people to discuss their individual requirements.
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.
I think it's appropriate to start with a set of limited customers and intensive communication to expand and stabilize the offering. Amazon and others usually limit new features to specific customers, too. Once it's stable and working, they make it available to more customers.
The weird thing afaiac is that lidl is about the least online supermarket there is, at least here in the uk. No home delivery, no online catalogue, one time I had to order a replacement battery for one of their drills and was directed to a different company entirely.
Aws was spun out from a successful large scale online retailer. What are lidl thinking?
>The weird thing afaiac is that lidl is about the least online supermarkets there is, at least here in the uk. No home delivery, no online catalogue ...
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 literally only a problem because the US laws allow the US government to force MS / Google / Amazon to hand over all data stored by German companies on data residing in German datacenters located inside Germany, if an American company is running them.
That bullshit caused us a huge amount of headaches when we wanted to deploy our COVID systems to Azure...
When we are talking about cloud and digital services there is nothing protectionist about it. The amount of powers all countries spy agencies have over cloud platforms is scary.
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 :(
> Nothing with worldwide relevance in the software, AI nor cloud space came out of Germany / the EU within in the last decades.
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.
I'm afraid that though I've heard of most of these, this short list reinforces rather than refutes the claim by covering such wide ranges of area and time period.
Germany is #5 on your provided link if you click on "Countries with most current unicorns". But yes, the USA has 20 times the number of unicorns, and I've said that the german tech industry is dwarved by the US one. More than half the unicorns on that website are in the USA (665 in the USA, 1328 - 665 = 663 outside). My point was that Germany definitely had some world known brands in software, it's more than zero.
That's probably due to market size. Germany has a market of 80 Million people and the only countries you can easily expand to without a lot of additional overhead are the DACH-region.
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.
I wonder how much of this is due to the vast tech salary discrepancies (especially in areas like AI and cloud) between Europe and the US. I bet the Lidl cloud engineers are getting paid at most a third of their AWS counterparts. If you want AWS quality, you have to pay AWS salaries.
Afaik both countries have tax incentives for R&D already. What the EU needs is :
- 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.
I agree. I'd love to see European institutions to begin using European software and infrastructure. I feel like we have lots of puzzle pieces already, I'd add ONLYOFFICE to the mix, which would be very important to replace Google Drive / Docs / Sheets or Microsoft 365. They even have a free personal tier to test the waters.
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.
You mean "Schengen" not the Chinese city Shenzhen right? The agreement allowing free travel/work between EU countries and Switzerland as well as some others signed in Schengen, Luxembourg.
We should do Strasbourg. 2 hours from Paris by train, a few from Berlin and Bruxelle. European name and international notoriety. Great place, climate, used to be fought for by both France and Germany and I think its sounding like a place eastern EU would like as well.
Yeah. I dont know. I guess Ireland is irish's. Also it is managed by Irish government. We need a place that will grow into a federal europe. Something like that.
It’s not a German thing. It’s a European thing. Lots of Europeans have made huge contributions to technology working in US companies, mostly in the US because that’s where the money is.
They don't even have to work for US companies. As a recent example, the Dirty Pipe vulnerability was discovered by a German Engineer working for a very basic website hoster.
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.
another Good example of this is the work RIPE is doing in regards to its work in securing the internet/bgp peering the model of ixp's as a community compared to how it works in the US.
I love hetzner but they aren't really the AWS of Germany - they are a great place to get simple cheap instances but don't have many of the more complex offerings that would make them an 'AWS'.
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 advantage is rapid burst scaling. Some businesses have workloads that only require a handful of small servers for most of the year, but for short periods of time require hundreds or even thousands of servers to process sudden workload bursts. Some examples:
* 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.
If all you need is Virtual Machines, stay with such a cheaper platform, that's not what you're getting AWS (or the other big ones) for.
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.
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.
> 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€?
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).
Lots of logspam volume that I'm immediately going to tamp down.
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.
We pay more, what we pay for is making it easily available to a lot more people than before. That is actually cheap for what you get, but if you do not get anything extra besides a text dump it's expensive
Get away with bad code and gargantuan queries for 2-3 years by scaling vertically. Blame your monolith and the engineers that built it when scaling vertically can't mitigate tech debt anymore, and rearchitect to microservices to "fix it". Collect tax deductions and executive bonuses in the process (the journey is more important than the destination)
Or just the peace of mind of being able to fully recreate infrastructure easily, if need be.
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").
But at what price… I have said it here many times, but I am a nobody so I can repeat it; one of my weekend side businesses is optimising overall performance for companies. They contact me with something like ‘I am paying 50k$/mo for aws and out app still goes down with traffic’. The case I did today one month ago was doing 10k/mo on aws and that jumps up mentally with traffic. This is a SaaS site and startup and they are bootstrapped. I moved all over to docker compose and then to a $10/mo vps; it didn’t crash and burn and now they make profit. This is not apples to apples; they made a complete shitshow on aws and in their code and their db (on rds). So I fixed some things and moved it over. On aws this improved setup would still be 10x or more expensive. It is very visible that most startup owners never saw a crisis now; this took me 12 hours… so that’s about 2k$ cost for me for a $9990 saving per month.
How much of the cost discrepancy was due to issues inherent with AWS, versus extremely poor engineering on the part of the startup? As a trivial example, I too can rack up a massive cloud bill by provisioning a 128 core VM for a web app that only sees a few thousand hits per day. But the massive bill isn’t the fault of the cloud provider; it’s the fault of my own bad engineering choices.
Yes, I agree, hence I said not apples to apples, but like said, the same exact vps costs over 10x as much on aws. That’s not good.
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.
Their products lead to a complex "Get advice now" form. Guess I'll stick with my 'Made in Cyprus' VPS provider that lets me create and destroy VPS instances with a couple of clicks for a similar price.
I know some of my dudes running tor services on turkish-part of Cyprus and believe me they really care about their customers due to the competitive nature of the business.
This is yet another attempt to put something together on top of Openstack and sell it as an alternative to the big three cloud providers. As a German, it always annoys me when crap like this is presented as "made in Germany". No sign-up process, no IaC first approach, documentation is a joke.
No,thanks.
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 wishes, I'll be happy once proven wrong.
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.
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.
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.
It's never too late tbh, but in this case it makes zero sense. The competition is also "made in Germany", it's not like all the datacenters/providers are fully run from the US or something.
The only ones who would fall for this gimmick are the people who only buy "made in Germany" in Lidl, I guess?
When I try to think of European tech companies I think SAP and Spotify. There’s just nothing remotely comparable to Silicon Valley in Continental Europe, Switzerland included. London and Tel Aviv are each very far ahead of the closest European startup hub, Berlin and there’s just nothing there.
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 don't disagree with your remarks about startups and big "software" companies, or rather the lack thereof in the EU.
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.
> 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.
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?
This entire thread reads like people actually believe that a business does not have any value until it pulls in billions in revenue.
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 US administration brazenly forced TikTok to move its US business to the US, it's fair play if the EU uses some subtle regulatory nudging to incentivize European companies to store their data inside the EU.
The Chinese government has forced plenty of US companies to move data local from apple to tesla. Also a vast majority of tiktoks revenue comes from the US to this day, they can’t afford to lose it. unlike with india and probably every other region they operate in outside of china. It’s also not brazen as the two countries aren’t on best terms atm.
There are a couple of smaller "cloud" providers who do not ([1]). I think this might be simply because they lack the tech for traffic shaping here. So they usually implement a "fair use policy" (whatever that means). But yes, ingress and egress traffic is essentially offered for free.
[1]: Another one is gridscale.io, also from Germany
>Built in 2018, the first [datacenter] offers up to 1,000 sqm (10,760 sq ft), with another 4,500 sqm (48,400 sq ft) to be offered in phase two; it reportedly has a PUE of 1.1 and utilizes river cooling. [The second datacenter] offers 300 sqm (3,200 sq ft) across two data halls.
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?
Nah, I'd be surprised if it's something else. This is a Lidl project that's being touted as "AWS competition" every few months, but it looks more like a small proof of concept that an actual competitor.
Sort of like a kids bike is a competitor for a truck.
Lidl is known to expand quickly, if they succeed they should do a co-op with hetzner or OVH both very well known for rapid expansion of data centers with a very high efficiency and low costs. (Yes, both made their mistakes, but they built and learned their lesson in-house hence aquired deep domain knowledge in contrast of typical players which just rent or outsource)
I know it's more of a joke, but some people might think this might actually happen. Here is why not:
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.
Do they even understand how difficult it is to be AWS? They had to write off over €500m on a botched implementation of SAP. Are they trying to apply their no frills low cost philosophy to cloud services, do they think thats going to be enough?
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.
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..
Kinda but not really. Hetzner targets small businesses, etc, or at least they have the reputation to do that. Large companies in the EU will mostly avoid them for anything serious, because they do not seem "reliable" and "stable" and "big" enough. Same thing with OVH. One of OVH's data centers burning down did additional reputational damage (which happened because they seem to have skipped on proper fire suppression systems in order to build it faster). I am sure Hetzners reputation took a hit as well, even though they had nothing to do with it, but are kind of considered to be on the same tier as OVH.
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 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.
>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.
I think what everybody is missing so far is that they're able to dogfood their own cloud offering through their Lidl and Kaufland subsidiaries the same way Amazon did. That's a huge boon because it means they need to build it to meet real world requirements. It will help them be more competitive, though how much remains to be seen.
It is a big matter in Germany and the EU, generally, where the data resides. There is some general consensus to avoid "overseas" servers for mission critical stuff, thinking that there is no control over them regarding privacy.
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.
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.