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#cloud#lidl#aws#actually#schwarz#dependent#amazon#don#service#makes

Discussion (74 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

retiredabout 3 hours ago
Years ago I was making the case that instead of digging ourselves into the Amazon eco-system with S3 storage, EC2 instances, DynamoDB and various other Amazon specific cloud products... we should just host virtual machines and have everything in there using open source products.

People looked at me like they saw water burning but that would have made the dependency on the US a lot easier to sever. Just move the VM's.

PaulKeebleabout 2 hours ago
There was a period when development and system adminstrators were really concerned about vendor lock in and would choose on the basis of the ease of moving to a different platform, Java and J2EE was clearly based on this mindset. I have always found it odd people have been willing to adopt AWS with no apparent easy route off given its price.
xfactorialabout 3 hours ago
The whole business model is around “Optimization through custom tools”.

We can go with your idea, sure: a few months in, an Account Manager from the cloud provider shows up and says your bill could be reduced by 50% if you just adopt some changes, using their custom, super optimized tools (“minor changes” will be the mantra).

And now you have your own company looking back to you on how can they get those savings, people who don’t understand what a VM is and cannot differentiate salesforce from an elastic container, as everything is “cloud”, but heard “50% off”.

RobotToasterabout 2 hours ago
Do people actually take claims like that from glorified salesmen seriously?

If a car salesman told me I could save 50% of my fuel bill from driving their special car a certain way I'd laugh at them.

SpicyLemonZestabout 2 hours ago
You'd be wrong to laugh at them, because different cars of the same general size can indeed vary 50% or more in fuel efficiency. It's fair to be skeptical of promises of huge savings, and question why your counterparty would benefit from giving you those savings, but sometimes there's a good reason.
pipersweabout 2 hours ago
They're probably not wrong, if they're talking about hypermiling a Prius
walrus01about 2 hours ago
> Do people actually take claims like that from glorified salesmen seriously?

People who know the tech, no

Non-technical middle management types, yes. It produces revenue when done aggressively enough, google "solarwinds sales people" for many anecdotal examples of extreme persistence. Not that I agree with it.

walrus01about 3 hours ago
Preventing this from happening requires a clued-in CTO and equivalent senior level leadership who can defend against such 'attack' methods and knows the difference between, for instance, paying a monthly recurring cost to host a Linux/KVM virtual machine and paying for some totally 'cloud' SaAs.

Further, it needs people in decision making roles who understand and value the strategic differences between having an infrastructure concept that is trapped in one provider's proprietary software tooling ecosystem (aws, azure, etc), vs things built on open standards that are portable.

BadBadJellyBeanabout 2 hours ago
I prefer not using managed services but I kind of understand the appeal. Instead of paying several engineers, that you have to vet first, to configure and maintain the services adjacent to your product you can just pay AWS or Azure or someone else to maintain the service. Then you can concentrate your whole manpower on your product. In case the service goes down you can blame someone else and maybe even recover some money. On the other hand it of course makes you dependent on the provider.
mulmenabout 2 hours ago
What you’re describing is outsourcing. It’s still possible with on-prem or cloud VMs. You just hire a contractor provide those services.
tt24about 2 hours ago
This is great, your suggestion to replace s3 and ddb is to run some VMs?

I don’t blame people for being skeptical

baqabout 2 hours ago
s3 is kinda hard to replace if you actually use it; the rest is manageable with varying levels of pain
kyproabout 2 hours ago
This would only work if you have a solid devops team imo. AWS makes it extremely easy to deploy and scale infra.

Another advantage of AWS is permission management, automatic RDS snapshots, cloudwatch comes out of the box...

You can do everything with VMs, but in practise it's probably much harder.

nine_kabout 3 hours ago
Most cloud VMs have network-attached storage working through a billing layer, and its IOPS numbers are pathetic. This makes running your own DB in a cloud VM much less reasonable. Now you can use local NVMe, but you still have to set up your own failover.

The original promise of the cloud is "you pay us less than you pay your sysadmins", which is not entirely unreasonable, especially at early stages.

Of course running on bare metal from Europe's own Hetzner is even more cost-efficient, if you already have a lot of sysadmin chops.

jbverschoorabout 2 hours ago
Nah.. Amazon started with “ephimeral” compute. That was the whole thing why you needed another storage layer

Unlike most VPSes

tjwebbnorfolkabout 1 hour ago
> will sign a major contract tomorrow

Ok so nothing has actually happened. These migrations are difficult and expensive, and often fail. It will be interesting to see an update in 5 years on how this went.

helsinkiandrewabout 1 hour ago
Here’s the service:

https://stackit.com/en

sourcecodeplzabout 1 hour ago
Isn't this how AWS also started? They built internal devops tools for them that were so good and expandable that they decided to give others access to them.
Havoc14 minutes ago
Yeah, though in this case the selling point is less about scale and more about data sovereignty. German companies are pretty touchy about storing data cross borders
tjwebbnorfolkabout 1 hour ago
> will sign a major contract tomorrow

Ok so nothing has actually happened. It's also not specified whether this is in addition to their AWS footprint, or if it's a migration. It will be interesting to see an update in 5 years on how this goes.

pier25about 3 hours ago
Wait... Lidl has a cloud service now?
kodama-lensabout 3 hours ago
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
storusabout 3 hours ago
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.
scandoxabout 3 hours ago
So the 7,500 they say they're employing...is not true?
ivan_gammelabout 2 hours ago
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.
ambicapterabout 3 hours ago
Lidl is a grocery store chain, I'm assuming GP was talking about the amount of people actually working on the cloud.
walthamstowabout 3 hours ago
The things you can find in the middle aisle!
apparaturabout 3 hours ago
Sure and it's on SALE right now if you have the customer loyalty card!
tcp_handshakerabout 2 hours ago
Its terrible...just go and try to open an account...it broken from the start

https://accounts.stackit.cloud/ui/login/user

janmarsalabout 2 hours ago
You need to download the lidl+ app. great value
MiinusMiinusabout 1 hour ago
I'm so happy that companies are ditching the big tech. Not enough fast enough imo.
holodukeabout 1 hour ago
And Germany is better? It's government is almost a copy of the 10 commandments of war propoganda. I don't know but it seems to be a dangerous place to put your stuff.
strangegecko27 minutes ago
Expand?

German government is certainly slow and overly limited by bureaucracy, but dangerous?

Who are you comparing to?

vrganj33 minutes ago
The last war Germany started famously ended 80 years ago.

The last war the US started is still ongoing and was started by them a few weeks ago.

close04about 1 hour ago
The missing background piece is that the European Commission awarded a 180m EUR sovereign cloud contract to 4 European providers [0]. This framework agreement made the choice of national banks a lot more straight forward.

[0] https://commission.europa.eu/news-and-media/news/commission-...

tomschwihaabout 2 hours ago
The title is heavy clickbait. To say I just bought a Porsche when it was actually a Volkswagen is also wrong. Just because they belong to the same owner doesn't make it the same brand.
croesabout 2 hours ago
It’s actually the other way around. Porsche is a Volkswagen but a Volkswagen isn’t necessarily a Porsche.

VW bought Porsche

AndroTuxabout 2 hours ago
Yes, that's what they're saying. LIDL doesn't have a cloud. The Schwarz Group does.
sammy2255about 1 hour ago
LIDL servers LuL
speedgooseabout 2 hours ago
Yes I guess banks don’t mind the high prices of Lidl’s cloud.

It’s very much not a discount cloud provider. They are costly unlike their physical discount grocery stores.

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kjkjadksjabout 3 hours ago
Crazy that a discount grocer can trade blows with big american cloud compute.
browningstreetabout 3 hours ago
Don't you mean that it's crazy that a discount grocer can trade blows with a bookseller?
retiredabout 3 hours ago
LIDL sells everything you need in your life in the middle aisle. Even cloud solutions.
bodelectaabout 2 hours ago
It's going to be hard getting that angle grinder I've never needed when there's a line of CTO's blocking the aisle
burner-phone73about 3 hours ago
The Schwarz Gruppe (owner of Lidl) makes about as much as Meta and Microsoft. So, yes, they're are big player.
myroon5about 2 hours ago
ivan_gammelabout 2 hours ago
Lidl doesn‘t do that. It is just a grocery discounter, one company of the many in that corporate structure, and one of the users of that cloud.
joaodlfabout 3 hours ago
Not necessarily trading blows, but LIDL is huge in all sorts of figures. From revenue to employment numbers.
Barrin92about 2 hours ago
the parent company (Schwarz Group) has over half a million employees and makes something like 200 billion in revenue per year, I think calling it a discount grocer is underselling it a bit lol.
guywithahatabout 3 hours ago
> DNB Director Steven Maijoor announced last October that he intended to “set a good example” and switch to a European cloud, though he acknowledged that it “is not yet as robust or high-quality as the one from the U.S.”

> Last year, the Dutch Central Bank (DNB) and the Netherlands Authority for the Financial Markets (AFM) warned that the Dutch financial sector had become too dependent on foreign IT service providers

I wonder how much if this is a personal choice, and how much is pressure from the government. Banks are famously the first target of politicians, and it's common in China for exec's to publicly choose a national option under pressure from the CPP.

wolfi1about 3 hours ago
Lidl is German, so, not fully national, IMHO
graemepabout 2 hours ago
If they cannot provide it nationally, Germany seems a good place to have it, especially as they are both EU.

At the very least a country dependent cloud services from multiple other countries is less dependent on any one of them than a country predominantly dependent on one (and most of Europe is currently dependent on US cloud providers).

semiquaverabout 1 hour ago
Aldi has a cloud? Do you have to put a quarter in when you log into the console that you get back when you log out?
actionfromafarabout 1 hour ago
Amazon has a cloud? Do you have to buy a book when you log in?