23 ms·

Lidl to Launch Rival to AWS

459 points by jpswade 6y ago

breakingcups 6y ago
I'll take "News headlines I did not expect" for $50, Alex.
- sideshowb 6y ago
  I could swear I saw a cloud platform on the middle aisle last week but now I need it it's gone!
abhisuri97 6y ago
Ignorant American here who has never heard of Lidl/Schwarz Group before. Is there anything in their history that would show that they know how to do compute? Is their infrastructure right now really solid/better than AWS?
- Jnr 6y ago
  Who could forget their SAP failure two years ago. https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252446965/Lidl-dumps-500m-SAP-project https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252446965/Lidl-dumps-500...
  - hobofan 6y ago
    That was also the first thing I thought of when I read the headline. Might have been a wake up call for them to put more resources into IT and make it a core competency in the future.
- puszczyk 6y ago
  They are a very popular discount (I guess a bit like Walmart, but this is not a 1:1 analogy). The article mentions cloud for the retailers and 70 cloud specialists. It think this is far from AWS scale and judging by the article I’d expect they (will) offer services for European retailers rather than general purpose global cloud. They are good in their core business, and I’m sure this means logistics, marketing, etc. but does it translate to potential operational efficiency in cloud infra I honestly don’t know. It may, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.
- hotgeart 6y ago
  European (BE) here, no. They are just know for being cheap stores and have time to time crazy promo on an limited article. You can't even rly do all of your groceries there. Unless you only eat frozen chickens, chips, soda and vegetable cans. Their website is slow af btw (4s to display a detail page). So if they want to do an AWS like. They'll need to invest. Its not like Amazon : hey we've a bunch of unused servers why we don't rent them?
  - hobofan 6y ago
    > hey we've a bunch of unused servers why we don't rent them? That's not the origin story of AWS. That myth has been debunked numerous times.
redis_mlc 6y ago
I've come across a bunch of startups in SV with the premise of competing with AWS. Pretty big mountain to climb.
- fsloth 6y ago
  The resources Schwarz group has are quite large. Also, EU has zeigeist that they need their own massive cloud providers. So think it as a new flavour of Boeing vs Airbus, if you will. Hopefully with not so many state subsidies.
  - enitihas 6y ago
    How large are their resources? Keep in mind we are talking about clod computing here where the big 3 themselves should be doing 60-70 billion dollars in sales yearly, so large has to be relative to the Industry.
    - est31 6y ago
      According to Wikipedia, Schwarz group had revenue of €104 billion in 2018/2019, while Amazon had revenue of $280 billion in 2019. The employee count of Schwarz group is 429k while for Amazon it's 840k. So Amazon is double in size overall. It's not an impossible thing for them. That being said, I think their current ambitions are more limited by just running their own infrastructure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwarz_Gruppe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwarz_Gruppe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_(company) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_(company)
    - Barrin92 6y ago
      The Schwarz-Group (which operates the LIDL brand among a few others) is huge. They do about 100 billion in revenue annually and have half a million employees or so. However, I've never heard of them venturing into tech, although I guess it's possible. Walmart is pretty solid when it comes to tech, and there's certainly enough talent across Germany and Europe.
    - AngusH 6y ago
runj__ 6y ago
In Sweden Lidl is know for being suspiciously cheap, they're even playing on it in their ads here. They had a marketing stunt where a chef started a luxury pop-up restaurant and the payoff was that it was all Lidl ingredients. "You can cook good food EVEN though you're using Lidl stuff" I'm not 100% sure that's what I want of a cloud provider.
- rumanator 6y ago
  You don't want for a cloud provider a world class service that is cheap?
  - Eikon 6y ago
    Lidl is not world class, it’s just cheap.
    - TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
      Lidl is world class and cheap. It's a solid operation, and has a long history of successfully undercutting "premium" brands. But more interestingly the move suggests Amazon is in danger of real competition in commoditised cloud infrastructure, as well as retail marketing and logistics. To an outsider, AWS is an incomprehensible mess of confusing service offerings which is nearly impossible to cost and only slightly easier to set up. It's not hard to imagine a B2B offering which simplifies and commodifies the technology on offer and the way it's paid for. And a B2C offering which copies Amazon Marketplace but with more consistent product quality.
    - TomMarius 6y ago
      It is maybe not world class, but compared to other options in EU, it's first class
      - mhast 6y ago
        I have never been in a Lidl Store I would consider "first class". It's not bad products but they have a few factors that severely limit the impressions. They mostly only carry their own brand with extremely limited options. If you want orange marmalade they have one style from one brand (their own). If you want some other style, find a different store. (This is the case with most of their items besides a small additional selection of eg certain candy, but still very sparse compared to other stores.) Most items are set up in bulk on the cargo carriers it comes on. Although this is probably also a lot for show to give a "price consious" appeal. They tend to have a significant part of the store dedicated to whatever random garbage they got a good deal on. Sometimes it's a boardgame, sometimes it's a stuffed animal, sometimes it's a power tool. Usually decent quality, but rarely the best. For me I put Lidl in the class of store where you have to make multiple trips to different stores. If I'm cooking I can rarely go only to Lidl. You usually go there to buy some of the stuff you need but then get the rest at some other store with more items.
archgoon 6y ago
Huh; I would have pegged Walmart to try this first.
- archgoon 6y ago
  ... this was a serious point. Walmart has invested significantly in it's own infrastructure https://www.investopedia.com/news/walmarts-new-weapon-against-amazon-cloud/ https://www.investopedia.com/news/walmarts-new-weapon-agains... And regularly stipulates SaaS providers that it contracts with to not use any AWS resources. Stipulating that they use their service in future is likely the next logical step. My pardon, I assumed that this was common knowledge; though it would appear that their branding is so terrible that this is assumed to be a joke.
bigtones 6y ago
"The acquisition, which completed on May 1, brings 70 cloud specialists into the wider group”. For comparison, Amazon has 40,000 employees in AWS.
- gibolt 6y ago
  Surely it can't be that many. And if it is, that has to include janitors at their data centers.
  - cameronbrown 6y ago
    Sure it can. Also, a lot more engineers are required to take a product to market at a big corp than a startup.
    - saagarjha 6y ago
      That’s more engineers than all of Facebook, AFAIK, and they’re not known for being particularly lean.
    - mikorym 6y ago
      If you look at the core technology only, then you often just need a handful of experts. It's all the rest that is the problem. The REAPER DAW was written by one person. The initial Linux kernel was written by one person. cURL was written by one person and even your BMW uses it [1]. The original Skype was written by three programmers. The list goes on... Of course, you later get a lot of maintainers joining the projects. But you certainly don't need 40 000 programmers if you are not selling your product, or not selling it yet. And even then I think a lot of those jobs are, while they are useful for AWS, not part of the core development. [1] https://curl.haxx.se/docs/companies.html https://curl.haxx.se/docs/companies.html
  - 9nGQluzmnq3M 6y ago
    I'd wager a guess that less than half of that is engineering (At Oracle the sales:engineer ratio is around 3:1.)
estsauver 6y ago
I'm really confused why they think european data protection laws are likely to be a big barrier. I think Amazon is well poised to let you choose regions for things, and unless LIDL knows something we don't, will probably be able to adapt to almost any new regulations as well or as fast as Lidl could. I also wonder why I would trust LIDL to execute on a vital part of infrastructure for us, when they can't manage an SAP migration project... https://www.consultancy.uk/news/18243/lidl-cancels-sap-introduction-having-sunk-500-million-into-it https://www.consultancy.uk/news/18243/lidl-cancels-sap-intro...
- vertex-four 6y ago
  American companies so far have been really bad at actually complying with regulations like the GDPR - many do on the surface level, but if you're a European company that wants to do things right and not take risks on the interpretation of things like "consent", suddenly your pool of potential third-party data processors drops significantly. There's a serious cultural issue there.
  - mschuster91 6y ago
    > There's a serious cultural issue there. Said "cultural issue" is the reason why the GDPR was implemented in the first place! It was not European ad-tech running wild tracking people all over the place so hard that even the notoriously slow and complex EU parliament had no choice but to act in the interest of their constituents.
    - luch 6y ago
      Let's not kid ourselves : European ad-tech companies are not substantially more ethical than their American counterparts. GDPR (even with its current clumsy implementation) is a much needed piece of legislation since the data processing market have no economic interest in "behaving" ethically.
- Eduard 6y ago
  US companies will comply, knowingly or unknowingly, to US government requests for handing out data, no matter GDPR and data center location within EU.
CiPHPerCoder 6y ago
I don't want to sound dismissive, but I don't think their acquisition is going to be enough for them to compete with AWS. https://www.camao.one/de-de/referenzen https://www.camao.one/de-de/referenzen Unless they have some other cards they haven't played yet, this sounds more like a headline intended for investors rather than customers.
- patagona 6y ago
  Yea, the german link above doesn't even mention the acquisition and the german source for the english article ("Lebensmittel Zeitung") doesn't talk about "cloud specialists" either. CAMAO IDC are software developers (who know how to use the cloud), not "cloud specialists" in the sense that they know how to run a cloud provider. Source: I work there
- eb0la 6y ago
  70 people is not much for, except for a vertical solution. If they can sell/co-host big warehouse management like Manhattan at a fraction of AWS, they could succeed.
jonex 6y ago
I doubt the headline properly captures their intent, the article itself is very light on details, but this quote might shine some light at it: "Lidl’s parent company Schwarz Group is taking on Amazon by launching its own cloud computing service for third party retailers." My guess would be that they are not aiming to compete with AWS per se, rather to offer infrastructure and services for online stores, which could possibly include having their own data centers for the service part.
- qwe098cube 6y ago
  I would think so, too. Considering that Lidl is the biggest discounter with around 11,000 branches worldwide, it might make sense for them to ditch AWS and set up their own, independent infrastructure.
- discodave 6y ago
  Sounds more like Shopify maybe.
Zenst 6y ago
I suspect that this may of came about due to the cancelation of a half a billion SAP migration and need to update their own internal systems. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/lidl-cancels-sap-introduction-after-spending-500m-euro-andrea-cravero https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/lidl-cancels-sap-introduction...
Cu3PO42 6y ago
I'm currently getting a 500 on the link. Here's [1] an alternative source, originally in German but put through Google Translate. There's three things to note there: it's not Lidl itself, but the parent company doing this, and the plans were announced late last year. Also they're building out the infrastructure for internal use first and are not necessarily looking to offer a cloud to customers, though they may work with select other companies. EDIT: I was able to load the original source just now and it claims that following an acquisition they were now offering/planning to offer this service to other retailers. I cannot find other sources (particular German ones) supporting this claim. The blog of the allegedly acquired company speaks of a "strategic partnership" and "investment" only [2]. EDIT 2: This [3] is the German source that the link on this post refers to. Unfortunately it's paywalled. The abstract claims that the acquisition is a "building block in building out their Cloud business". [1] https://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?depth=1&nv=1&pto=aue&rurl=translate.google.com&sl=auto&sp=nmt4&tl=en&u=https://app.handelsblatt.com/technik/it-tk/schwarz-gruppe-mutterkonzern-von-lidl-und-kaufland-will-eigene-cloud-aufbauen/25309556.html%3Fticket%3DST-1196336-geSLo7SoWOv1bffksFjl-ap3&usg=ALkJrhiG-7wllaAXgcWaupAqkowHJhQHRA https://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?depth=1&... [2] https://camao.one/blog/partnerschaft-schwarz-gruppe-heilbronn/#english-version https://camao.one/blog/partnerschaft-schwarz-gruppe-heilbron... [3] https://www.lebensmittelzeitung.net/tech-logistik/Lidl-und-Kaufland-Schwarz-IT-sichert-sich-Know-how-fuer-die-eigene-Cloud-146160 https://www.lebensmittelzeitung.net/tech-logistik/Lidl-und-K...
- ksec 6y ago
  If this is the case it would make more sense. Just a note your link is still pointing to the same source.
  - Cu3PO42 6y ago
    Huh, that it did. I have legitimately no idea how that happened, other than "copy paste shenanigans on my phone". I fixed it now.
- qwe098cube 6y ago
  here is an archive http://archive.is/yICx0 http://archive.is/yICx0
rjknight 6y ago
This seems sufficiently unlikely that I wonder if something has been lost in translation. My guess would be that Lidl does expect to do something innovative in e-commerce (around, say, augmented reality) and is planning to offer that as a service to other retailers, hence the comparison with Amazon's strategy. I can't believe that Lidl is planning to compete with S3 or EC2.
- onion2k 6y ago
  It's Lidl's parent company that's launching the service, after buying a cloud provider. The headline is just stupid. It's equivalent to an article titled "Whole Foods runs AWS".
  - luckylion 6y ago
    No. Whole Foods is one of many Amazon ventures, but not the most significant. Supermarkets (Lidl and Kaufland chains, mostly) are the main business of Schwarz Group. It's more like saying "Google will do X" when it's technically Alphabet that spawns X.
- imhoguy 6y ago
  LidlCloud?
fsloth 6y ago
Europe, especially Germany, has this general consensus that EU needs it's inhouse large cloud providers. So think about state subsidies, preferring european partners and stuff like that. With enough capital and will they will get to somewhere. You can be sure the political establishment likely has their back.
- luckylion 6y ago
  And Lidl/Schwarz especially has a strict No-Amazon-Policy. They see Amazon as a competitor, so if you want to work with them on a corporate level, you must not use AWS to process or store anything relating to their business. They do make exceptions, but you better be prepared to make a hell of a case for your product for them to reach up to upper management and ask for an exception to buy your services. And it makes sense, of course. If you rely on US-companies, you're dependent on the US. Any political or economical conflict will result in Washington pressuring US-companies and you'll be in a bad place. Given that most European governments (and Germany's especially) are very unhappy with the current US administration, it's obvious that they'd want to reduce dependencies.
  - oneplane 6y ago
    I still think it's weird that companies think this helps anything. AWS isn't the same as the Amazon shop. Yes it shares the name and if you go enough levels above management you end up with Bezos but other than that their computers != their shop. Sometimes people then point to the fact that it's still a US company but ironically people try to make that point on their US-created computers using websites on a US-owned gTLD with US-owned software. Generic cloud resources seem like the smallest issue to me in that chain.
    - luckylion 6y ago
      Amazon said (to Congress, no less) that it does not let it's own team responsible to deciding on which products to buy & sell access confidential sales reports of third party sellers that use their platform. And then it was revealed that they regularly do get access to these information. There's no reasonable expectation that Amazon will not use any data it can easily access to make decisions. I don't find that your argument regarding "using US created computers" and "US-owned gTLD" holds water. It's very hard to build e.g. CPUs that will contain very advanced backdoors that are totally hidden but can easily be targeted remotely to gather information, and the same goes for secretly using a domain. Additionally, the cost of doing so is astronomically high: the total loss of trust in US chip makers and internet companies. They may very well do that during major wars, but not to steal some company secrets. On the other hand, it's easy for Amazon to siphon off data from AWS and even just using meta data (e.g. looking at how and when a customer scales to what size) gives you valuable insight into their business. And if they get caught? A few politicians will be annoyed, a few media articles (but hey, they may overshadow reports on unionization, so it's not all bad) and potentially a few companies leaving their platform, while others will undoubtedly say "I have nothing to hide from Amazon, so what?" In other words the threat model is dramatically different.
ksec 6y ago
If Hetzner ( Also from Germany ) cant / isn't competing with AWS, why does Lidl thinks they can? It then also mention Delivery in UK, and ecommerce projects. Which makes me doubt if the publication knows what AWS really is. The whole piece ( If you can even call it a piece ) is very poor reporting, to the point I am thinking of should I be flagging this. Edit: Please Read Comment by Cu3PO42 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23151233 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23151233.
- liberal_098 6y ago
  > If Hetzner ( Also from Germany ) cant / isn't competing with AWS, why does Lidl thinks they can? Probably they want to repeat the success of AWS and apply the same pattern. Their retail businesses will provide base load for the cloud. Their own services can be developed in such a way that they can sell them to other retailers as cloud services. Or they develop a market place and switch to platform business.
  - jotm 6y ago
    Develop their own tools and get people locked in? Yeah, I don't see that happening, unless maybe they lobby for further EU-wide Internet regulations aimed at keeping US/foreign companies out. https://lobste.rs/s/wfltz1/eu_commissioned_study_proposes_european https://lobste.rs/s/wfltz1/eu_commissioned_study_proposes_eu... Oh...
- dvfjsdhgfv 6y ago
  > If Hetzner ( Also from Germany ) cant / isn't competing with AWS, why does Lidl thinks they can? Hetzner has a completely different business model and so far it has been working very well for them. They are good at optimization of all their available resources via flexible pricing. As their loyal customer for almost 10 years I love one their aspect that I hate with AWS: with Hetzner, I'm 100% sure how much I'm going to pay at the end of the billing period. Actually, for several of my customers I turned on yearly billing as the amounts are so ridiculously small.
- raverbashing 6y ago
  > If Hetzner ( Also from Germany ) cant / isn't competing with AWS This makes as much sense as saying "So if Digital Ocean (also from the US) can't compete with AWS, who can?" They're different niches
barrenko 6y ago
I'm pretty sure they could do it, on a German-speaking scene, which is sheltered in and of itself.
drawfloat 6y ago
While the concerns over Schwarz Group's (because it is the parent group, not 'Lidl') lack of experience in the sector is valid, I do think some of the dismissive reactions here underline a major risk to future competitiveness in infrastructure providers. Amazon is well established. Amazon has thousands of employees. Amazon does, ultimately, provide a good service. But Amazon is also dominant, demonstrates a callous disregard for worker rights in its other business arms, and has used its solid AWS profits as a way to prop up its undercutting and dismantling of other sectors. Other businesses will not enter the space in as developed a state as AWS. That shouldn't be used as a negative against them even trying. Otherwise, AWS is only going to become more entrenched and the options for building at scale will become more limited.
bashtoni 6y ago
This sounds like a misunderstanding to me. When you look at the details, it looks much more as though they're launching an alternative to Ocado, a company providing technology for food retailers to offer home delivery - they work with Kroger in the US.
bflesch 6y ago
I've been to LIDL / Schwarz Group headquarters in Heilbronn last year, and while they're a super young company with a vibrant atmosphere (which quite unique amongst large German companies), IMO they are ultimately too much attached to their legacy cash cows. They are not streamlining retail processes because they earn too much money with it. They have great IT talent, which is building fancy pilots all day, but refuse roll them out because it will cannibalize their core business. Their core business is keeping people in the store for as long as possible so they buy more stuff. On the logistics side, they have been the first large-scale retailer to digitize the EUR-pallets (they have RFID-based plastic pallets) which allows for some pretty fancy stuff. They roll out their pallet processing tech at the suppliers' plant and have logistics data in their systems even before it is loaded on the suppliers' trucks.
- barbecue_sauce 6y ago
  I've only been to Lidls in the US, but their stores seem pretty streamlined to me.
  - forkerenok 6y ago
    I think GP means that they are unwilling to open up their logistics mojo to other efforts in fears that it would interfere with their well-run retail operations.
  - dna_polymerase 6y ago
    In Germany, their store managers do inventory manually, which means they have to order items they run low on, no tech insight. Their attempt at setting up SAP failed after burning 500 million on it. Delivery robots, Amazon-style prototypes for cashier-less systems, heck, even Instacart like delivery are nowhere to be found. If Amazon decided to enter the German supermarket landscape, Lidl (also, Aldi and others) would be in serious trouble.
    - verst 6y ago
      Trader Joe's in the US is owned by Aldi Nord. How come Trader Joe's is doing well here in the US despite Amazon? I don't know anything about the operations and logistics of Trader Joe's but from a consumer perspective the stores seem very streamlined. In many ways it reminds me of Lidl in Germany (more so than Aldi).
megaframe 6y ago
I don't get how they plan to compete, do they have chip designers? or deals with SOC manufacturers because AWS/Google/Microsoft are fast because of custom chips that link NVMe directly to the NIC and skip the CPU and some of the network stack
- INTPenis 6y ago
  This is clickbait. That's why it says Lidl instead of Schwarz Group. Everyone in Europe knows Lidl and find it amusing that they would run a cloud service. Which means they'll click the link. In reality it's a major german business group who plans to get into IT services with a recent acquisition. They have none of the experience that AWS or GCP have acquired in the last 6-10 years. They'll do their best and I honestly hope it works out because I want to see more European cloud providers compete with american ones.
  - londons_explore 6y ago
    Plans to get into IT logistics services. If you want a database tracking how many potatoes are in which trucks and when they'll arrive, they'll sell it to you. If you want a Kubernetes cluster, that isn't their business.
benjohnson1707 6y ago
Former Schwarz employee here: The company made SO much money in the past 4 decades with big box / discount retailing, you won't believe it. Salaries are off the charts (it would make senior software engineers in SV look pale). Hubris is as well. The only thing that drives reasoning are statements like 'we're not just some random company, we're Schwarz Group'. It's the poster child Corp described by Andy Gorves statement: Success breeds complacency, complacency breeds failure. Only the paranoid survive. At the same time, skill level did not take off so much. Just to give you some insight: The Lidl online store team is not even aware of KPIs like CAC or LTV or even how many new customers were acquired in a given year. And it's a 10-year-old unit (still burning millions per year) . The whole corporation is basically a 2-person-empire (the only two people that own shares and have taken the thing from 1 store to ~13k stores globally). They make every major call, and even random minor calls. It should be mentioned that they are 72 and 80 years old, respectively. The Cloud idea very likely was acquired together with a former SAP cloud sales VP. Here is the difference: Core Schwarz DNA is selling packed soup to end customers at crazy scale, without even intervening in the whole process. Core DNA SAP is large scale enterprise sales. Go read the Stratechery posting about why Google failed with GCP to understand why Schwarz should not do this. When I once mentioned this in a LinkedIn thread, I was urged by colleagues to delete the comment because 'management did not like it'. They are getting into the car sales and recycle business as well. Just to give you an impression. Interesting times though :)
- ljf 6y ago
  I was running a stall at a graduate careers fair and was amazed at the interest both Aldi and Lidl were getting. Both had amazing starting salaries - I think Aldi was £48k rising to £70k over 3 years if you went on the area manager scheme. Plus a car. The teams there were so enthusiastic and energised and appeared to really really enjoy their jobs. I am impressed by any company that consistently looks after their staff financially and otherwise.
  - valzam 6y ago
    I don't have firsthand experience but from what I know those salaries come with very high expectations. Things like "you have to drive to some random neighborhood on a Sunday to check that flyers were being delivered correctly'.
scandox 6y ago
Didn't Lidl abandon a 500 million SAP integration recently? I mean perhaps this kind of failure is part of their motivation, but it certainly seems like a leap. I'm certainly hoping a major European player emerges in cloud but it would be an impressive diversification in this case.
SparklingCotton 6y ago
Many good reasons why this would work in Europe. - Logistics in Germany is awesome, and Amazon really doesn't have a leg up on the already existing logistics solutions there. - For a cloud provider, negotiating deals now when AMD is on the rise must be perfect. - Beating AWS on EC2 pricing is easy. AWS EC2 pricing is insanely expensive. German providers like Hetzner Cloud entered the market at 1/10th of the EC2 price. - A k8s-focused cloud provider gets an enormous number of already existing k8s services without the need to compete directly with all the AWS services. A "Hetzner Cloud" + K8S in Germany? I'd move all my stuff there.
- kleiba 6y ago
  Right. Plus, let's not forget the legal implications for the companies that will be able to keep their data within Europe.
  - Torwald 6y ago
    This is big. And it can only grow with future legislation. This could tie in to security measures and standards in the future. We will see what happens, but it is a strategic advantage as for now.
  - jdietrich 6y ago
    What legal implications? AWS customers can choose to keep user data wholly within the EU regions, or they can transfer data freely between EU and US regions thanks to Amazon's certification under the EU-US Privacy Shield framework. One of the great strengths of AWS is their phenomenal compliance department - whatever regulations you're subject to, AWS offer tools, guidance and support to help you maintain compliance. That's one of many, many reasons why AWS is simply incomparable with cheaper cloud offerings from smaller providers. https://aws.amazon.com/compliance/programs/ https://aws.amazon.com/compliance/programs/
    - zwaps 6y ago
      Nobody would or should trust Amazon, an American company, to actually stand by those promises. It will syphon off any trade secrets and other infos, especially if the NSA asks. It has literally happened. I think after Snowden we should have gotten wise on how much official treaties and promises are worth. Before, this was the thinking of conspiracy nuts. Now it is prudent consideration. Germans would now, the US literally wiretapped their head of government, and also ran operations to extract trade secrets. Without reprise to this day, by the way. At end of the day, the new name of the game is America first. Having a EU company handle your data is really an advantage. US laws and treaties come with and asterisks.
KingOfCoders 6y ago
For some time now I think why Hetzner is that weak? We've used them in my last Startup and their cloud offering was fine (price, quality), but to use them one would need loadbalancers and managed Postgres and some caching We managed that on our own but it felt unnecessary. AWS has a lot of bells and whistles not every one needs, but there is a set of tools you need to operate a website. I currently use DO who are very slow but get there I think.
- icebraining 6y ago
  Not everyone needs to compete in the same market. There are some EU providers moving in that direction (e.g. OVH now offers managed Kubernetes, block storage, load balancers, etc), but Hetzner is very useful if you don't need that stuff.
tekkk 6y ago
I am sceptical but I applaud their effort. If Google has trouble competing, it wont be easy for Lidl either. Yet having a true European option with enough low prices and reliable engineering could work. From my experience retailers dont often have the engineering expertise to pull these kind of things off, but with a culture that empowers developers instead of keeping them as puppets of the managers, they might manage to find and keep good talent. I hope they at least embrace open-source options and easy billing management, to counter-act the greediness of AWS-way of doing things. Competition in this area is definitely a good thing for all the customers.
joyj2nd 6y ago
This may work and may be much cheaper than the overpriced Amazon AWS, since Germany does not pay her people well. Most salaries are are a fraction of US salaries. This is the main reason for the exorbitant and quite bad trade surplus of Germany, who exports both, goods AND capital. Lidl has not quite a big reputation for IT: https://www.consultancy.uk/news/18243/lidl-cancels-sap-introduction-having-sunk-500-million-into-it https://www.consultancy.uk/news/18243/lidl-cancels-sap-intro...
isthisnametaken 6y ago
Presumably this service will be available for a week or so, and then replaced by a selection of garden furniture and a welding helmet
supermatt 6y ago
I dont think this is about AWS. The company they mention that was acquired was a web/marketing agency, providing solutions based on 3rd party CMS platforms - not a datacenter/ops specialist.
Vosporos 6y ago
If they are as cheap as their transport management system (which required Silverlight), nothing good can come out of this.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
doener 6y ago
This is not was the original source says (in German and behind paywall: https://www.lebensmittelzeitung.net/tech-logistik/Lidl-und-Kaufland-Schwarz-IT-sichert-sich-Know-how-fuer-die-eigene-Cloud-146160?crefresh=1 https://www.lebensmittelzeitung.net/tech-logistik/Lidl-und-K...). It is not clear if the cloud will be publicly available for customers and therefore a rival to AWS.
fergie 6y ago
There's definitely more of an opportunity in EU cloud services than you might think. I work for a pretty big EU university (~50000 users) and there is very little AWS/Azure/Google we can actually legally use. And this isn't a case of "bureaucracy gone mad" either, there are some real concerns with the big cloud providers that the rest of the world doesnt seem to have the time or the energy to tackle. Another thing is that AWS/Azure/Google are getting _super_ complex. The idea of a back to basics cloud provider that fully complies with GDPR might actually be a compelling offering. That said- whether this kind of tech can come from a budget supermarket chain in Germany is another thing all together. Despite the hype, not much exportable tech actually comes out of Berlin, and its not clear that they have the breadth and depth of expertise in "open source at scale" to make this actually happen. But on the other hand- who knows? Will be interesting to see.
sethx 6y ago
Didn't Lidl just burn 1.x Billion on a new failed SAP backoffice tool, and now they're getting into cloud hosting? OH MY GOD.
agsilvio 6y ago
When all we want is for them to put the Parkside cordless jigsaw on sale.
makkesk8 6y ago
> many have expressed concerns that AWS cash reserves and low prices could be major obstacles in securing clients. Low prices? Seriously?
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
sidcool 6y ago
I think the article intends to convey that Lidl is launching some cloud products to compete with a smaller segment of AWS. I would not think it's possible to challenge AWS or Azure (may be even GCP) for the next 5 years.
lowercased 6y ago
Someone else mentioned 'hubris' here. We had a Lidl open up near us 2 years ago (in the US) - generally good store with good prices. Nice size. We were looking forward to more. We saw where they'd opened some of their stores, and couldn't figure out the justification - some locations just seemed odd. Read a few months later that they were 'scaling back' US development, and new build stores would be about half the size of the one we got (which... isn't huge). They couldn't hire regional people to help them find better locations? Their inventory system seems out of whack - the stuff we buy regularly will just ... vanish, never to come back. We've been shopping and heard others complain of the same thing - sometimes the same items we were looking for (and had used to buy). Their in store bakery was initially great - for about a week, then scaled back and rarely has anything fresh - regardless of time of day. You can tell if/when there's been some regional VP to visit that day because the bakery is hot/fresh/piping that day, then... offline. Now... many US folks in grocery stores may not be used to 'good bakeries', and perhaps it was a money loser for them, but... they didn't really give ours a chance to develop with the local shoppers in the first place. Give people more than 2 choices of bread - do it for a month or two, to give people time to try out options, get a rhythm, etc. Buying something, liking it, then coming back 3 days later for more and the bakery is effectively 'closed'... doesn't make you want to come back. I wish they'd focus more on better in store inventory/stocking before moving to be an AWS-killer....
- C1sc0cat 6y ago
  That's Lidl's MO they don't commit to having a consistent product line
- asynch8 6y ago
  Lidl's MO is focusing more on being cost-effective for both the consumer and themselves rather than the brands
slightwinder 6y ago
I guess this is the result of their epic failed migration to SAP. They blowed 500 Million and 7+ years in an attempt to unify their IT on SAP, until they realized it's just not working. I guess they then started building their own solution, and bring now others into the round, which is kinda similar to how AWS started. Amazon too started offering their extra resources to others, until it grow into a business of their own. I have my doubt, but I really hope this becomes something good. Good european competition in that sector is quite neccessary. We have seen how european laws influenced the world, and especially USA in the last years, hopefully business can reach similar effects.
pantulis 6y ago
Well it's only the journalist who is talking about a "AWS rival". What if Lidl could come up with a cloud architecture specifically tailored for the challenges that any brick and mortar retailer has? I'm talking about pre-built solutions for real time stockage, logistics, integration with common ERPs, etc. It may well end up running on top of AWS!
jillesvangurp 6y ago
I work in Germany currently. Big German companies have a lot of bad reflexes in common when it comes to doing big IT projects and it's a reason for a lot of companies failing repeatedly in this space because they have the wrong focus and assumptions. One of those reflexes basically boils down to combination of ineptness and not invented here (i.e. in Germany) syndrome. Another part of this is that the locals have an understandable historical aversion against anything invading privacy; as this has been abused by both nazi's and communists to hurt people in the past. Unfortunately the net result is an industry that is still dependent on shoveling around a lot of paper via post and fax (!!), and a misguided trust in the security of what is basically a patch work of small companies, corporate departments, and government agencies working with very outdated, home grown stuff that can only be assumed at this point to be quite insecure and hopelessly compromised by foreign and domestic intelligence agencies at so many levels that you might as well print the stuff in a newspaper. Most customers you talk to almost right away start assuming they can't use AWS, Google cloud, or Azure for legal reasons. Of course, all of these run data centers in Germany where they comply with applicable law to keep their quite many German customers across basically all industries happy. This is a complete non issue from a technical and legal point of view. Also, the likes of IBM, SAP, and Oracle are happy to take your money for running this for you (at great expense). Yet, I've had this discussion with several naive startup founders where they are going to build X and of course from day 1 are going to do their own infrastructure as well because it's obviously the right thing to do (for them). Most of these startups die young. Most bigger German companies get burned repeatedly by this stuff as well. I know at least one billion dollar construction materials company insisting on running their own cloud that are sinking obscene amounts of cash into running things in a convoluted way. There's no shortage of local suppliers preying on this type of behavior. I declined working on their pile of steaming manure. LIDL just burned 0.5 billion with a local IT supplier (SAP) that milked them for the fools they are on a project that they should have pulled the plug on years ago. That's all you need to know about their level of competency in this area. Saying this is doomed to fail is just stating the obvious.
MaxBarraclough 6y ago
Wonder if they'll offer ARM servers. Might make sense if they're serious about competing on price.
durnygbur 6y ago
Lidl and Kaufland stop delivering flyers and leaflets to my place in Poland. First - this is not Germany and we don't waste papper left and right for any formal and informal, solicited and unsolicited communication. Second - I don't want your papper spam, I don't want any spam in any form really.
jonahbenton 6y ago
Sometimes I play a game with myself where I read the HN comments first, then read the piece. It's like watching a game of telephone. To my reading a) lidl is NOT launching an AWS competitor, per se b) this is all about the data and the power of the logistics platform Amazon is heavy in the food business. Amazon observes the use of any of its primitive services by any competitors to determine where growth is occurring, then goes and eats competitor business. Lidl will not use AWS, wants its supply chain to not use AWS, and would prefer to have adjacent businesses use primitives (like distribution logistics) it makes available so it can observe and eat them when time is right. Walmart already two years ahead in this game.
- tyingq 6y ago
  "It's like watching a game of telephone" It's not really a mismatch of the comments and article though. The title of the article is "Lidl owner launching its own rival to Amazon Web Services". And the body says things like "While Schwarz IT intends to use Europe’s enhanced data protection laws as a key differentiator to Amazon’s dominant service". So perhaps you're right about the true purpose, but the article is claiming otherwise.
  - jonahbenton 6y ago
    Yes- I didn't make the point well, but that's the point. The game of telephone goes like- * there's what I would guess to be reality * the things the article says, that distort from (what I would guess to be) reality * the things the headline says that distort from what the article says * the things most HN commenters who only read the headline say that distort yet further from the article and from reality By reading some of the top HN comments, and then the article, I get to play this game backwards. This was a particularly good example. I don't doubt that Lidl is building some platform for retailers and its supply chain to use. That's just good business. And no doubt data protection plays some role in the strategy, though data protection is a right generally afforded individuals, and Lidl's focus will be commercial. But these two paragraphs are particularly out of proportion: Schwarz Group, which owns both Lidl and Kaufland, is launching its own rival to Amazon Web Services (AWS) following the recent acquisition of software specialist Camao IDC and The acquisition, which completed on May 1, brings 70 cloud specialists into the wider group representing key “resources in an important area of digitalisation”. AWS probably hired 70 people in a couple of hours yesterday, dwarfed by Amazon as a whole, which probably hired 5,000.
nprateem 6y ago
Hopefully this means I'll be able to rent a blowtorch and an air compressor and only pay for the time I use it.
40four 6y ago
This quality of this article is terrible. It's very short (235 words), there are no concrete sources, or solid evidence that this is real. This is nothing more than speculation. Is this considered journalism is 2020? Even more sad, is when you search and try to find better sources, and realize that it's mostly just a few small, outlier publications, copy and pasting off of each other. Business Insider unabashedly copy and pasted from Charged Retail, and didn't even bother to format/ edit/ paraphrase anything. Even text from the link to sign up for the Charged Retail news letter is in there (https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/lidl-owner-launching-its-own-rival-to-amazon-web-services-8852719 https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/lidl-owner-l...). So the way I see this, there is no story here. This is not real news. This is a rumor. Maybe even fake news. Nothing more, so let's stop talking about it.
- jpswade 6y ago
  "The medium is the message" so they say. This is what the Internet has become. The commentary is what makes this interesting, not the content of the article.
  - 40four 6y ago
    Hey, I like comments and commentary as much as the next person. But when I waste 10 minutes of my morning perusing threads, I really hope they are about something real :) To be fair, you're probably right. The commentary is the most interesting part, even if the content is just a rumor, or hypothetical or whatever. There is still some value to be had from the threads. I saw a lot of experiences or personal info shared here about Schwarz Group, so some of that was interesting.
- SamuelAdams 6y ago
  This article is a textbook example of "news stacking" from the book "Trust Me, I'm Lying" by Ryan Holiday [1]. Step 1, post some outlandish stories to random blog posts. These blog posts are usually niche, and are run by some "experts" with a core audience. They are trusted to be right. Then that gets picked up by intermediary news sites like this *.co.uk domain. Then it gets floated to social media, where it gets popular and noticed by the big guns (NYT, Business Insider, Tech Crunch, etc) and then they just post the same stuff. Then suddenly what was once a rumor becomes true. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trust_Me,_I%27m_Lying https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trust_Me,_I%27m_Lying
callamdelaney 6y ago
Perhaps they should think about an online store first?
Hir0ki 6y ago
They aleady have a Website [0] for the cloud Platform. By the looks of it they want to start with a managed K8s and database services. If you look at the job offers, you can see that they are using OpenStack[1] for some parts of there platfrom [0] https://stackit.de/en/cloud/ https://stackit.de/en/cloud/ [1] https://schwarz.jobs.schwarz/job/Neckarsulm-&-Umgebung-Cloud-Infrastructure-Engineer-%28wmd%29/573464801/ https://schwarz.jobs.schwarz/job/Neckarsulm-&-Umgebung-Cloud...
atlgator 6y ago
The author doesn't realize AWS is for more than just ecommerce making the comparison highly suspect.
daralthus 6y ago
This is the same Lidl who spent €500m on a failed SAP rollout, right?
zeruch 6y ago
This is like a weird parallel of Fry's getting out of the grocery biz in California and selling electronics instead.
tewwi 6y ago
Too Lidl too late? (sorry)
Bayart 6y ago
Headlines you never expected to read.
ThinkBeat 6y ago
I welcome more non-American owned or hosted companies in this space but going from practically zero to take on AWS is a heck of a long way to go,and would require enormous amounts of capital. Hopefully, they can stat out with offerings that are especially attractive for European retailers or something like that.
cocoland 6y ago
As a novice engineer , i would like to ask the larger community few view point questions just out of curiosity. If you were the CTO/CIO and were tasked in building up a cloud that competes with behemoths , how would you do it. Of course it would be an "A Team" to do it , but what would be your priorities (e.g pick up cloud foundry and build things on top , take low hanging IaaS services) , there are so many aspects to it , how would you track progress and decide when to go out to market ? How would different teams (right from procurement , network , premises , to developers and ops personnel) be managed and seamlessly work ? What would be reasonable milestones and $$ spends ? :) Note this is purely out of curiosity..any links/blogs would be fine too :)

459 points by jpswade 6y ago

breakingcups 6y ago

I'll take "News headlines I did not expect" for $50, Alex.

sideshowb 6y ago
I could swear I saw a cloud platform on the middle aisle last week but now I need it it's gone!

abhisuri97 6y ago

Ignorant American here who has never heard of Lidl/Schwarz Group before. Is there anything in their history that would show that they know how to do compute? Is their infrastructure right now really solid/better than AWS?

Jnr 6y ago
Who could forget their SAP failure two years ago. https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252446965/Lidl-dumps-500m-SAP-project https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252446965/Lidl-dumps-500...
- hobofan 6y ago
  That was also the first thing I thought of when I read the headline. Might have been a wake up call for them to put more resources into IT and make it a core competency in the future.
puszczyk 6y ago
They are a very popular discount (I guess a bit like Walmart, but this is not a 1:1 analogy). The article mentions cloud for the retailers and 70 cloud specialists. It think this is far from AWS scale and judging by the article I’d expect they (will) offer services for European retailers rather than general purpose global cloud. They are good in their core business, and I’m sure this means logistics, marketing, etc. but does it translate to potential operational efficiency in cloud infra I honestly don’t know. It may, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.
hotgeart 6y ago
European (BE) here, no. They are just know for being cheap stores and have time to time crazy promo on an limited article. You can't even rly do all of your groceries there. Unless you only eat frozen chickens, chips, soda and vegetable cans. Their website is slow af btw (4s to display a detail page). So if they want to do an AWS like. They'll need to invest. Its not like Amazon : hey we've a bunch of unused servers why we don't rent them?
- hobofan 6y ago
  > hey we've a bunch of unused servers why we don't rent them? That's not the origin story of AWS. That myth has been debunked numerous times.

redis_mlc 6y ago

I've come across a bunch of startups in SV with the premise of competing with AWS. Pretty big mountain to climb.

fsloth 6y ago
The resources Schwarz group has are quite large. Also, EU has zeigeist that they need their own massive cloud providers. So think it as a new flavour of Boeing vs Airbus, if you will. Hopefully with not so many state subsidies.
- enitihas 6y ago
  How large are their resources? Keep in mind we are talking about clod computing here where the big 3 themselves should be doing 60-70 billion dollars in sales yearly, so large has to be relative to the Industry.
  - est31 6y ago
    According to Wikipedia, Schwarz group had revenue of €104 billion in 2018/2019, while Amazon had revenue of $280 billion in 2019. The employee count of Schwarz group is 429k while for Amazon it's 840k. So Amazon is double in size overall. It's not an impossible thing for them. That being said, I think their current ambitions are more limited by just running their own infrastructure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwarz_Gruppe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwarz_Gruppe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_(company) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_(company)
  - Barrin92 6y ago
    The Schwarz-Group (which operates the LIDL brand among a few others) is huge. They do about 100 billion in revenue annually and have half a million employees or so. However, I've never heard of them venturing into tech, although I guess it's possible. Walmart is pretty solid when it comes to tech, and there's certainly enough talent across Germany and Europe.
  - AngusH 6y ago

runj__ 6y ago

In Sweden Lidl is know for being suspiciously cheap, they're even playing on it in their ads here. They had a marketing stunt where a chef started a luxury pop-up restaurant and the payoff was that it was all Lidl ingredients. "You can cook good food EVEN though you're using Lidl stuff" I'm not 100% sure that's what I want of a cloud provider.

rumanator 6y ago
You don't want for a cloud provider a world class service that is cheap?
- Eikon 6y ago
  Lidl is not world class, it’s just cheap.
  - TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
    Lidl is world class and cheap. It's a solid operation, and has a long history of successfully undercutting "premium" brands. But more interestingly the move suggests Amazon is in danger of real competition in commoditised cloud infrastructure, as well as retail marketing and logistics. To an outsider, AWS is an incomprehensible mess of confusing service offerings which is nearly impossible to cost and only slightly easier to set up. It's not hard to imagine a B2B offering which simplifies and commodifies the technology on offer and the way it's paid for. And a B2C offering which copies Amazon Marketplace but with more consistent product quality.
  - TomMarius 6y ago
    It is maybe not world class, but compared to other options in EU, it's first class
    - mhast 6y ago
      I have never been in a Lidl Store I would consider "first class". It's not bad products but they have a few factors that severely limit the impressions. They mostly only carry their own brand with extremely limited options. If you want orange marmalade they have one style from one brand (their own). If you want some other style, find a different store. (This is the case with most of their items besides a small additional selection of eg certain candy, but still very sparse compared to other stores.) Most items are set up in bulk on the cargo carriers it comes on. Although this is probably also a lot for show to give a "price consious" appeal. They tend to have a significant part of the store dedicated to whatever random garbage they got a good deal on. Sometimes it's a boardgame, sometimes it's a stuffed animal, sometimes it's a power tool. Usually decent quality, but rarely the best. For me I put Lidl in the class of store where you have to make multiple trips to different stores. If I'm cooking I can rarely go only to Lidl. You usually go there to buy some of the stuff you need but then get the rest at some other store with more items.

archgoon 6y ago

Huh; I would have pegged Walmart to try this first.

archgoon 6y ago
... this was a serious point. Walmart has invested significantly in it's own infrastructure https://www.investopedia.com/news/walmarts-new-weapon-against-amazon-cloud/ https://www.investopedia.com/news/walmarts-new-weapon-agains... And regularly stipulates SaaS providers that it contracts with to not use any AWS resources. Stipulating that they use their service in future is likely the next logical step. My pardon, I assumed that this was common knowledge; though it would appear that their branding is so terrible that this is assumed to be a joke.

bigtones 6y ago

"The acquisition, which completed on May 1, brings 70 cloud specialists into the wider group”. For comparison, Amazon has 40,000 employees in AWS.

gibolt 6y ago
Surely it can't be that many. And if it is, that has to include janitors at their data centers.
- cameronbrown 6y ago
  Sure it can. Also, a lot more engineers are required to take a product to market at a big corp than a startup.
  - saagarjha 6y ago
    That’s more engineers than all of Facebook, AFAIK, and they’re not known for being particularly lean.
  - mikorym 6y ago
    If you look at the core technology only, then you often just need a handful of experts. It's all the rest that is the problem. The REAPER DAW was written by one person. The initial Linux kernel was written by one person. cURL was written by one person and even your BMW uses it [1]. The original Skype was written by three programmers. The list goes on... Of course, you later get a lot of maintainers joining the projects. But you certainly don't need 40 000 programmers if you are not selling your product, or not selling it yet. And even then I think a lot of those jobs are, while they are useful for AWS, not part of the core development. [1] https://curl.haxx.se/docs/companies.html https://curl.haxx.se/docs/companies.html
- 9nGQluzmnq3M 6y ago
  I'd wager a guess that less than half of that is engineering (At Oracle the sales:engineer ratio is around 3:1.)

estsauver 6y ago

I'm really confused why they think european data protection laws are likely to be a big barrier. I think Amazon is well poised to let you choose regions for things, and unless LIDL knows something we don't, will probably be able to adapt to almost any new regulations as well or as fast as Lidl could. I also wonder why I would trust LIDL to execute on a vital part of infrastructure for us, when they can't manage an SAP migration project... https://www.consultancy.uk/news/18243/lidl-cancels-sap-introduction-having-sunk-500-million-into-it https://www.consultancy.uk/news/18243/lidl-cancels-sap-intro...

vertex-four 6y ago
American companies so far have been really bad at actually complying with regulations like the GDPR - many do on the surface level, but if you're a European company that wants to do things right and not take risks on the interpretation of things like "consent", suddenly your pool of potential third-party data processors drops significantly. There's a serious cultural issue there.
- mschuster91 6y ago
  > There's a serious cultural issue there. Said "cultural issue" is the reason why the GDPR was implemented in the first place! It was not European ad-tech running wild tracking people all over the place so hard that even the notoriously slow and complex EU parliament had no choice but to act in the interest of their constituents.
  - luch 6y ago
    Let's not kid ourselves : European ad-tech companies are not substantially more ethical than their American counterparts. GDPR (even with its current clumsy implementation) is a much needed piece of legislation since the data processing market have no economic interest in "behaving" ethically.
Eduard 6y ago
US companies will comply, knowingly or unknowingly, to US government requests for handing out data, no matter GDPR and data center location within EU.

CiPHPerCoder 6y ago

I don't want to sound dismissive, but I don't think their acquisition is going to be enough for them to compete with AWS. https://www.camao.one/de-de/referenzen https://www.camao.one/de-de/referenzen Unless they have some other cards they haven't played yet, this sounds more like a headline intended for investors rather than customers.

patagona 6y ago
Yea, the german link above doesn't even mention the acquisition and the german source for the english article ("Lebensmittel Zeitung") doesn't talk about "cloud specialists" either. CAMAO IDC are software developers (who know how to use the cloud), not "cloud specialists" in the sense that they know how to run a cloud provider. Source: I work there
eb0la 6y ago
70 people is not much for, except for a vertical solution. If they can sell/co-host big warehouse management like Manhattan at a fraction of AWS, they could succeed.

jonex 6y ago

I doubt the headline properly captures their intent, the article itself is very light on details, but this quote might shine some light at it: "Lidl’s parent company Schwarz Group is taking on Amazon by launching its own cloud computing service for third party retailers." My guess would be that they are not aiming to compete with AWS per se, rather to offer infrastructure and services for online stores, which could possibly include having their own data centers for the service part.

qwe098cube 6y ago
I would think so, too. Considering that Lidl is the biggest discounter with around 11,000 branches worldwide, it might make sense for them to ditch AWS and set up their own, independent infrastructure.
discodave 6y ago
Sounds more like Shopify maybe.

Zenst 6y ago

I suspect that this may of came about due to the cancelation of a half a billion SAP migration and need to update their own internal systems. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/lidl-cancels-sap-introduction-after-spending-500m-euro-andrea-cravero https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/lidl-cancels-sap-introduction...

Cu3PO42 6y ago

I'm currently getting a 500 on the link. Here's [1] an alternative source, originally in German but put through Google Translate. There's three things to note there: it's not Lidl itself, but the parent company doing this, and the plans were announced late last year. Also they're building out the infrastructure for internal use first and are not necessarily looking to offer a cloud to customers, though they may work with select other companies. EDIT: I was able to load the original source just now and it claims that following an acquisition they were now offering/planning to offer this service to other retailers. I cannot find other sources (particular German ones) supporting this claim. The blog of the allegedly acquired company speaks of a "strategic partnership" and "investment" only [2]. EDIT 2: This [3] is the German source that the link on this post refers to. Unfortunately it's paywalled. The abstract claims that the acquisition is a "building block in building out their Cloud business". [1] https://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?depth=1&nv=1&pto=aue&rurl=translate.google.com&sl=auto&sp=nmt4&tl=en&u=https://app.handelsblatt.com/technik/it-tk/schwarz-gruppe-mutterkonzern-von-lidl-und-kaufland-will-eigene-cloud-aufbauen/25309556.html%3Fticket%3DST-1196336-geSLo7SoWOv1bffksFjl-ap3&usg=ALkJrhiG-7wllaAXgcWaupAqkowHJhQHRA https://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?depth=1&... [2] https://camao.one/blog/partnerschaft-schwarz-gruppe-heilbronn/#english-version https://camao.one/blog/partnerschaft-schwarz-gruppe-heilbron... [3] https://www.lebensmittelzeitung.net/tech-logistik/Lidl-und-Kaufland-Schwarz-IT-sichert-sich-Know-how-fuer-die-eigene-Cloud-146160 https://www.lebensmittelzeitung.net/tech-logistik/Lidl-und-K...

ksec 6y ago
If this is the case it would make more sense. Just a note your link is still pointing to the same source.
- Cu3PO42 6y ago
  Huh, that it did. I have legitimately no idea how that happened, other than "copy paste shenanigans on my phone". I fixed it now.
qwe098cube 6y ago
here is an archive http://archive.is/yICx0 http://archive.is/yICx0

rjknight 6y ago

This seems sufficiently unlikely that I wonder if something has been lost in translation. My guess would be that Lidl does expect to do something innovative in e-commerce (around, say, augmented reality) and is planning to offer that as a service to other retailers, hence the comparison with Amazon's strategy. I can't believe that Lidl is planning to compete with S3 or EC2.

onion2k 6y ago
It's Lidl's parent company that's launching the service, after buying a cloud provider. The headline is just stupid. It's equivalent to an article titled "Whole Foods runs AWS".
- luckylion 6y ago
  No. Whole Foods is one of many Amazon ventures, but not the most significant. Supermarkets (Lidl and Kaufland chains, mostly) are the main business of Schwarz Group. It's more like saying "Google will do X" when it's technically Alphabet that spawns X.
imhoguy 6y ago
LidlCloud?

fsloth 6y ago

Europe, especially Germany, has this general consensus that EU needs it's inhouse large cloud providers. So think about state subsidies, preferring european partners and stuff like that. With enough capital and will they will get to somewhere. You can be sure the political establishment likely has their back.

luckylion 6y ago
And Lidl/Schwarz especially has a strict No-Amazon-Policy. They see Amazon as a competitor, so if you want to work with them on a corporate level, you must not use AWS to process or store anything relating to their business. They do make exceptions, but you better be prepared to make a hell of a case for your product for them to reach up to upper management and ask for an exception to buy your services. And it makes sense, of course. If you rely on US-companies, you're dependent on the US. Any political or economical conflict will result in Washington pressuring US-companies and you'll be in a bad place. Given that most European governments (and Germany's especially) are very unhappy with the current US administration, it's obvious that they'd want to reduce dependencies.
- oneplane 6y ago
  I still think it's weird that companies think this helps anything. AWS isn't the same as the Amazon shop. Yes it shares the name and if you go enough levels above management you end up with Bezos but other than that their computers != their shop. Sometimes people then point to the fact that it's still a US company but ironically people try to make that point on their US-created computers using websites on a US-owned gTLD with US-owned software. Generic cloud resources seem like the smallest issue to me in that chain.
  - luckylion 6y ago
    Amazon said (to Congress, no less) that it does not let it's own team responsible to deciding on which products to buy & sell access confidential sales reports of third party sellers that use their platform. And then it was revealed that they regularly do get access to these information. There's no reasonable expectation that Amazon will not use any data it can easily access to make decisions. I don't find that your argument regarding "using US created computers" and "US-owned gTLD" holds water. It's very hard to build e.g. CPUs that will contain very advanced backdoors that are totally hidden but can easily be targeted remotely to gather information, and the same goes for secretly using a domain. Additionally, the cost of doing so is astronomically high: the total loss of trust in US chip makers and internet companies. They may very well do that during major wars, but not to steal some company secrets. On the other hand, it's easy for Amazon to siphon off data from AWS and even just using meta data (e.g. looking at how and when a customer scales to what size) gives you valuable insight into their business. And if they get caught? A few politicians will be annoyed, a few media articles (but hey, they may overshadow reports on unionization, so it's not all bad) and potentially a few companies leaving their platform, while others will undoubtedly say "I have nothing to hide from Amazon, so what?" In other words the threat model is dramatically different.

ksec 6y ago

If Hetzner ( Also from Germany ) cant / isn't competing with AWS, why does Lidl thinks they can? It then also mention Delivery in UK, and ecommerce projects. Which makes me doubt if the publication knows what AWS really is. The whole piece ( If you can even call it a piece ) is very poor reporting, to the point I am thinking of should I be flagging this. Edit: Please Read Comment by Cu3PO42 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23151233 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23151233.

liberal_098 6y ago
> If Hetzner ( Also from Germany ) cant / isn't competing with AWS, why does Lidl thinks they can? Probably they want to repeat the success of AWS and apply the same pattern. Their retail businesses will provide base load for the cloud. Their own services can be developed in such a way that they can sell them to other retailers as cloud services. Or they develop a market place and switch to platform business.
- jotm 6y ago
  Develop their own tools and get people locked in? Yeah, I don't see that happening, unless maybe they lobby for further EU-wide Internet regulations aimed at keeping US/foreign companies out. https://lobste.rs/s/wfltz1/eu_commissioned_study_proposes_european https://lobste.rs/s/wfltz1/eu_commissioned_study_proposes_eu... Oh...
dvfjsdhgfv 6y ago
> If Hetzner ( Also from Germany ) cant / isn't competing with AWS, why does Lidl thinks they can? Hetzner has a completely different business model and so far it has been working very well for them. They are good at optimization of all their available resources via flexible pricing. As their loyal customer for almost 10 years I love one their aspect that I hate with AWS: with Hetzner, I'm 100% sure how much I'm going to pay at the end of the billing period. Actually, for several of my customers I turned on yearly billing as the amounts are so ridiculously small.
raverbashing 6y ago
> If Hetzner ( Also from Germany ) cant / isn't competing with AWS This makes as much sense as saying "So if Digital Ocean (also from the US) can't compete with AWS, who can?" They're different niches

barrenko 6y ago

I'm pretty sure they could do it, on a German-speaking scene, which is sheltered in and of itself.

drawfloat 6y ago

While the concerns over Schwarz Group's (because it is the parent group, not 'Lidl') lack of experience in the sector is valid, I do think some of the dismissive reactions here underline a major risk to future competitiveness in infrastructure providers. Amazon is well established. Amazon has thousands of employees. Amazon does, ultimately, provide a good service. But Amazon is also dominant, demonstrates a callous disregard for worker rights in its other business arms, and has used its solid AWS profits as a way to prop up its undercutting and dismantling of other sectors. Other businesses will not enter the space in as developed a state as AWS. That shouldn't be used as a negative against them even trying. Otherwise, AWS is only going to become more entrenched and the options for building at scale will become more limited.

bashtoni 6y ago

This sounds like a misunderstanding to me. When you look at the details, it looks much more as though they're launching an alternative to Ocado, a company providing technology for food retailers to offer home delivery - they work with Kroger in the US.

bflesch 6y ago

I've been to LIDL / Schwarz Group headquarters in Heilbronn last year, and while they're a super young company with a vibrant atmosphere (which quite unique amongst large German companies), IMO they are ultimately too much attached to their legacy cash cows. They are not streamlining retail processes because they earn too much money with it. They have great IT talent, which is building fancy pilots all day, but refuse roll them out because it will cannibalize their core business. Their core business is keeping people in the store for as long as possible so they buy more stuff. On the logistics side, they have been the first large-scale retailer to digitize the EUR-pallets (they have RFID-based plastic pallets) which allows for some pretty fancy stuff. They roll out their pallet processing tech at the suppliers' plant and have logistics data in their systems even before it is loaded on the suppliers' trucks.

barbecue_sauce 6y ago
I've only been to Lidls in the US, but their stores seem pretty streamlined to me.
- forkerenok 6y ago
  I think GP means that they are unwilling to open up their logistics mojo to other efforts in fears that it would interfere with their well-run retail operations.
- dna_polymerase 6y ago
  In Germany, their store managers do inventory manually, which means they have to order items they run low on, no tech insight. Their attempt at setting up SAP failed after burning 500 million on it. Delivery robots, Amazon-style prototypes for cashier-less systems, heck, even Instacart like delivery are nowhere to be found. If Amazon decided to enter the German supermarket landscape, Lidl (also, Aldi and others) would be in serious trouble.
  - verst 6y ago
    Trader Joe's in the US is owned by Aldi Nord. How come Trader Joe's is doing well here in the US despite Amazon? I don't know anything about the operations and logistics of Trader Joe's but from a consumer perspective the stores seem very streamlined. In many ways it reminds me of Lidl in Germany (more so than Aldi).

megaframe 6y ago

I don't get how they plan to compete, do they have chip designers? or deals with SOC manufacturers because AWS/Google/Microsoft are fast because of custom chips that link NVMe directly to the NIC and skip the CPU and some of the network stack

INTPenis 6y ago
This is clickbait. That's why it says Lidl instead of Schwarz Group. Everyone in Europe knows Lidl and find it amusing that they would run a cloud service. Which means they'll click the link. In reality it's a major german business group who plans to get into IT services with a recent acquisition. They have none of the experience that AWS or GCP have acquired in the last 6-10 years. They'll do their best and I honestly hope it works out because I want to see more European cloud providers compete with american ones.
- londons_explore 6y ago
  Plans to get into IT logistics services. If you want a database tracking how many potatoes are in which trucks and when they'll arrive, they'll sell it to you. If you want a Kubernetes cluster, that isn't their business.

benjohnson1707 6y ago

Former Schwarz employee here: The company made SO much money in the past 4 decades with big box / discount retailing, you won't believe it. Salaries are off the charts (it would make senior software engineers in SV look pale). Hubris is as well. The only thing that drives reasoning are statements like 'we're not just some random company, we're Schwarz Group'. It's the poster child Corp described by Andy Gorves statement: Success breeds complacency, complacency breeds failure. Only the paranoid survive. At the same time, skill level did not take off so much. Just to give you some insight: The Lidl online store team is not even aware of KPIs like CAC or LTV or even how many new customers were acquired in a given year. And it's a 10-year-old unit (still burning millions per year) . The whole corporation is basically a 2-person-empire (the only two people that own shares and have taken the thing from 1 store to ~13k stores globally). They make every major call, and even random minor calls. It should be mentioned that they are 72 and 80 years old, respectively. The Cloud idea very likely was acquired together with a former SAP cloud sales VP. Here is the difference: Core Schwarz DNA is selling packed soup to end customers at crazy scale, without even intervening in the whole process. Core DNA SAP is large scale enterprise sales. Go read the Stratechery posting about why Google failed with GCP to understand why Schwarz should not do this. When I once mentioned this in a LinkedIn thread, I was urged by colleagues to delete the comment because 'management did not like it'. They are getting into the car sales and recycle business as well. Just to give you an impression. Interesting times though :)

ljf 6y ago
I was running a stall at a graduate careers fair and was amazed at the interest both Aldi and Lidl were getting. Both had amazing starting salaries - I think Aldi was £48k rising to £70k over 3 years if you went on the area manager scheme. Plus a car. The teams there were so enthusiastic and energised and appeared to really really enjoy their jobs. I am impressed by any company that consistently looks after their staff financially and otherwise.
- valzam 6y ago
  I don't have firsthand experience but from what I know those salaries come with very high expectations. Things like "you have to drive to some random neighborhood on a Sunday to check that flyers were being delivered correctly'.

scandox 6y ago

Didn't Lidl abandon a 500 million SAP integration recently? I mean perhaps this kind of failure is part of their motivation, but it certainly seems like a leap. I'm certainly hoping a major European player emerges in cloud but it would be an impressive diversification in this case.

SparklingCotton 6y ago

Many good reasons why this would work in Europe. - Logistics in Germany is awesome, and Amazon really doesn't have a leg up on the already existing logistics solutions there. - For a cloud provider, negotiating deals now when AMD is on the rise must be perfect. - Beating AWS on EC2 pricing is easy. AWS EC2 pricing is insanely expensive. German providers like Hetzner Cloud entered the market at 1/10th of the EC2 price. - A k8s-focused cloud provider gets an enormous number of already existing k8s services without the need to compete directly with all the AWS services. A "Hetzner Cloud" + K8S in Germany? I'd move all my stuff there.

kleiba 6y ago
Right. Plus, let's not forget the legal implications for the companies that will be able to keep their data within Europe.
- Torwald 6y ago
  This is big. And it can only grow with future legislation. This could tie in to security measures and standards in the future. We will see what happens, but it is a strategic advantage as for now.
- jdietrich 6y ago
  What legal implications? AWS customers can choose to keep user data wholly within the EU regions, or they can transfer data freely between EU and US regions thanks to Amazon's certification under the EU-US Privacy Shield framework. One of the great strengths of AWS is their phenomenal compliance department - whatever regulations you're subject to, AWS offer tools, guidance and support to help you maintain compliance. That's one of many, many reasons why AWS is simply incomparable with cheaper cloud offerings from smaller providers. https://aws.amazon.com/compliance/programs/ https://aws.amazon.com/compliance/programs/
  - zwaps 6y ago
    Nobody would or should trust Amazon, an American company, to actually stand by those promises. It will syphon off any trade secrets and other infos, especially if the NSA asks. It has literally happened. I think after Snowden we should have gotten wise on how much official treaties and promises are worth. Before, this was the thinking of conspiracy nuts. Now it is prudent consideration. Germans would now, the US literally wiretapped their head of government, and also ran operations to extract trade secrets. Without reprise to this day, by the way. At end of the day, the new name of the game is America first. Having a EU company handle your data is really an advantage. US laws and treaties come with and asterisks.

KingOfCoders 6y ago

For some time now I think why Hetzner is that weak? We've used them in my last Startup and their cloud offering was fine (price, quality), but to use them one would need loadbalancers and managed Postgres and some caching We managed that on our own but it felt unnecessary. AWS has a lot of bells and whistles not every one needs, but there is a set of tools you need to operate a website. I currently use DO who are very slow but get there I think.

icebraining 6y ago
Not everyone needs to compete in the same market. There are some EU providers moving in that direction (e.g. OVH now offers managed Kubernetes, block storage, load balancers, etc), but Hetzner is very useful if you don't need that stuff.

tekkk 6y ago

I am sceptical but I applaud their effort. If Google has trouble competing, it wont be easy for Lidl either. Yet having a true European option with enough low prices and reliable engineering could work. From my experience retailers dont often have the engineering expertise to pull these kind of things off, but with a culture that empowers developers instead of keeping them as puppets of the managers, they might manage to find and keep good talent. I hope they at least embrace open-source options and easy billing management, to counter-act the greediness of AWS-way of doing things. Competition in this area is definitely a good thing for all the customers.

joyj2nd 6y ago

This may work and may be much cheaper than the overpriced Amazon AWS, since Germany does not pay her people well. Most salaries are are a fraction of US salaries. This is the main reason for the exorbitant and quite bad trade surplus of Germany, who exports both, goods AND capital. Lidl has not quite a big reputation for IT: https://www.consultancy.uk/news/18243/lidl-cancels-sap-introduction-having-sunk-500-million-into-it https://www.consultancy.uk/news/18243/lidl-cancels-sap-intro...

isthisnametaken 6y ago

Presumably this service will be available for a week or so, and then replaced by a selection of garden furniture and a welding helmet

supermatt 6y ago

I dont think this is about AWS. The company they mention that was acquired was a web/marketing agency, providing solutions based on 3rd party CMS platforms - not a datacenter/ops specialist.

Vosporos 6y ago

If they are as cheap as their transport management system (which required Silverlight), nothing good can come out of this.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

doener 6y ago

This is not was the original source says (in German and behind paywall: https://www.lebensmittelzeitung.net/tech-logistik/Lidl-und-Kaufland-Schwarz-IT-sichert-sich-Know-how-fuer-die-eigene-Cloud-146160?crefresh=1 https://www.lebensmittelzeitung.net/tech-logistik/Lidl-und-K...). It is not clear if the cloud will be publicly available for customers and therefore a rival to AWS.

fergie 6y ago

There's definitely more of an opportunity in EU cloud services than you might think. I work for a pretty big EU university (~50000 users) and there is very little AWS/Azure/Google we can actually legally use. And this isn't a case of "bureaucracy gone mad" either, there are some real concerns with the big cloud providers that the rest of the world doesnt seem to have the time or the energy to tackle. Another thing is that AWS/Azure/Google are getting _super_ complex. The idea of a back to basics cloud provider that fully complies with GDPR might actually be a compelling offering. That said- whether this kind of tech can come from a budget supermarket chain in Germany is another thing all together. Despite the hype, not much exportable tech actually comes out of Berlin, and its not clear that they have the breadth and depth of expertise in "open source at scale" to make this actually happen. But on the other hand- who knows? Will be interesting to see.

sethx 6y ago

Didn't Lidl just burn 1.x Billion on a new failed SAP backoffice tool, and now they're getting into cloud hosting? OH MY GOD.

agsilvio 6y ago

When all we want is for them to put the Parkside cordless jigsaw on sale.

makkesk8 6y ago

> many have expressed concerns that AWS cash reserves and low prices could be major obstacles in securing clients. Low prices? Seriously?

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

sidcool 6y ago

I think the article intends to convey that Lidl is launching some cloud products to compete with a smaller segment of AWS. I would not think it's possible to challenge AWS or Azure (may be even GCP) for the next 5 years.

lowercased 6y ago

Someone else mentioned 'hubris' here. We had a Lidl open up near us 2 years ago (in the US) - generally good store with good prices. Nice size. We were looking forward to more. We saw where they'd opened some of their stores, and couldn't figure out the justification - some locations just seemed odd. Read a few months later that they were 'scaling back' US development, and new build stores would be about half the size of the one we got (which... isn't huge). They couldn't hire regional people to help them find better locations? Their inventory system seems out of whack - the stuff we buy regularly will just ... vanish, never to come back. We've been shopping and heard others complain of the same thing - sometimes the same items we were looking for (and had used to buy). Their in store bakery was initially great - for about a week, then scaled back and rarely has anything fresh - regardless of time of day. You can tell if/when there's been some regional VP to visit that day because the bakery is hot/fresh/piping that day, then... offline. Now... many US folks in grocery stores may not be used to 'good bakeries', and perhaps it was a money loser for them, but... they didn't really give ours a chance to develop with the local shoppers in the first place. Give people more than 2 choices of bread - do it for a month or two, to give people time to try out options, get a rhythm, etc. Buying something, liking it, then coming back 3 days later for more and the bakery is effectively 'closed'... doesn't make you want to come back. I wish they'd focus more on better in store inventory/stocking before moving to be an AWS-killer....

C1sc0cat 6y ago
That's Lidl's MO they don't commit to having a consistent product line
asynch8 6y ago
Lidl's MO is focusing more on being cost-effective for both the consumer and themselves rather than the brands

slightwinder 6y ago

I guess this is the result of their epic failed migration to SAP. They blowed 500 Million and 7+ years in an attempt to unify their IT on SAP, until they realized it's just not working. I guess they then started building their own solution, and bring now others into the round, which is kinda similar to how AWS started. Amazon too started offering their extra resources to others, until it grow into a business of their own. I have my doubt, but I really hope this becomes something good. Good european competition in that sector is quite neccessary. We have seen how european laws influenced the world, and especially USA in the last years, hopefully business can reach similar effects.

pantulis 6y ago

Well it's only the journalist who is talking about a "AWS rival". What if Lidl could come up with a cloud architecture specifically tailored for the challenges that any brick and mortar retailer has? I'm talking about pre-built solutions for real time stockage, logistics, integration with common ERPs, etc. It may well end up running on top of AWS!

jillesvangurp 6y ago

I work in Germany currently. Big German companies have a lot of bad reflexes in common when it comes to doing big IT projects and it's a reason for a lot of companies failing repeatedly in this space because they have the wrong focus and assumptions. One of those reflexes basically boils down to combination of ineptness and not invented here (i.e. in Germany) syndrome. Another part of this is that the locals have an understandable historical aversion against anything invading privacy; as this has been abused by both nazi's and communists to hurt people in the past. Unfortunately the net result is an industry that is still dependent on shoveling around a lot of paper via post and fax (!!), and a misguided trust in the security of what is basically a patch work of small companies, corporate departments, and government agencies working with very outdated, home grown stuff that can only be assumed at this point to be quite insecure and hopelessly compromised by foreign and domestic intelligence agencies at so many levels that you might as well print the stuff in a newspaper. Most customers you talk to almost right away start assuming they can't use AWS, Google cloud, or Azure for legal reasons. Of course, all of these run data centers in Germany where they comply with applicable law to keep their quite many German customers across basically all industries happy. This is a complete non issue from a technical and legal point of view. Also, the likes of IBM, SAP, and Oracle are happy to take your money for running this for you (at great expense). Yet, I've had this discussion with several naive startup founders where they are going to build X and of course from day 1 are going to do their own infrastructure as well because it's obviously the right thing to do (for them). Most of these startups die young. Most bigger German companies get burned repeatedly by this stuff as well. I know at least one billion dollar construction materials company insisting on running their own cloud that are sinking obscene amounts of cash into running things in a convoluted way. There's no shortage of local suppliers preying on this type of behavior. I declined working on their pile of steaming manure. LIDL just burned 0.5 billion with a local IT supplier (SAP) that milked them for the fools they are on a project that they should have pulled the plug on years ago. That's all you need to know about their level of competency in this area. Saying this is doomed to fail is just stating the obvious.

MaxBarraclough 6y ago

Wonder if they'll offer ARM servers. Might make sense if they're serious about competing on price.

durnygbur 6y ago

Lidl and Kaufland stop delivering flyers and leaflets to my place in Poland. First - this is not Germany and we don't waste papper left and right for any formal and informal, solicited and unsolicited communication. Second - I don't want your papper spam, I don't want any spam in any form really.

jonahbenton 6y ago

Sometimes I play a game with myself where I read the HN comments first, then read the piece. It's like watching a game of telephone. To my reading a) lidl is NOT launching an AWS competitor, per se b) this is all about the data and the power of the logistics platform Amazon is heavy in the food business. Amazon observes the use of any of its primitive services by any competitors to determine where growth is occurring, then goes and eats competitor business. Lidl will not use AWS, wants its supply chain to not use AWS, and would prefer to have adjacent businesses use primitives (like distribution logistics) it makes available so it can observe and eat them when time is right. Walmart already two years ahead in this game.

tyingq 6y ago
"It's like watching a game of telephone" It's not really a mismatch of the comments and article though. The title of the article is "Lidl owner launching its own rival to Amazon Web Services". And the body says things like "While Schwarz IT intends to use Europe’s enhanced data protection laws as a key differentiator to Amazon’s dominant service". So perhaps you're right about the true purpose, but the article is claiming otherwise.
- jonahbenton 6y ago
  Yes- I didn't make the point well, but that's the point. The game of telephone goes like- * there's what I would guess to be reality * the things the article says, that distort from (what I would guess to be) reality * the things the headline says that distort from what the article says * the things most HN commenters who only read the headline say that distort yet further from the article and from reality By reading some of the top HN comments, and then the article, I get to play this game backwards. This was a particularly good example. I don't doubt that Lidl is building some platform for retailers and its supply chain to use. That's just good business. And no doubt data protection plays some role in the strategy, though data protection is a right generally afforded individuals, and Lidl's focus will be commercial. But these two paragraphs are particularly out of proportion: Schwarz Group, which owns both Lidl and Kaufland, is launching its own rival to Amazon Web Services (AWS) following the recent acquisition of software specialist Camao IDC and The acquisition, which completed on May 1, brings 70 cloud specialists into the wider group representing key “resources in an important area of digitalisation”. AWS probably hired 70 people in a couple of hours yesterday, dwarfed by Amazon as a whole, which probably hired 5,000.

nprateem 6y ago

Hopefully this means I'll be able to rent a blowtorch and an air compressor and only pay for the time I use it.

40four 6y ago

This quality of this article is terrible. It's very short (235 words), there are no concrete sources, or solid evidence that this is real. This is nothing more than speculation. Is this considered journalism is 2020? Even more sad, is when you search and try to find better sources, and realize that it's mostly just a few small, outlier publications, copy and pasting off of each other. Business Insider unabashedly copy and pasted from Charged Retail, and didn't even bother to format/ edit/ paraphrase anything. Even text from the link to sign up for the Charged Retail news letter is in there (https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/lidl-owner-launching-its-own-rival-to-amazon-web-services-8852719 https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/lidl-owner-l...). So the way I see this, there is no story here. This is not real news. This is a rumor. Maybe even fake news. Nothing more, so let's stop talking about it.

jpswade 6y ago
"The medium is the message" so they say. This is what the Internet has become. The commentary is what makes this interesting, not the content of the article.
- 40four 6y ago
  Hey, I like comments and commentary as much as the next person. But when I waste 10 minutes of my morning perusing threads, I really hope they are about something real :) To be fair, you're probably right. The commentary is the most interesting part, even if the content is just a rumor, or hypothetical or whatever. There is still some value to be had from the threads. I saw a lot of experiences or personal info shared here about Schwarz Group, so some of that was interesting.
SamuelAdams 6y ago
This article is a textbook example of "news stacking" from the book "Trust Me, I'm Lying" by Ryan Holiday [1]. Step 1, post some outlandish stories to random blog posts. These blog posts are usually niche, and are run by some "experts" with a core audience. They are trusted to be right. Then that gets picked up by intermediary news sites like this *.co.uk domain. Then it gets floated to social media, where it gets popular and noticed by the big guns (NYT, Business Insider, Tech Crunch, etc) and then they just post the same stuff. Then suddenly what was once a rumor becomes true. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trust_Me,_I%27m_Lying https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trust_Me,_I%27m_Lying

callamdelaney 6y ago

Perhaps they should think about an online store first?

Hir0ki 6y ago

They aleady have a Website [0] for the cloud Platform. By the looks of it they want to start with a managed K8s and database services. If you look at the job offers, you can see that they are using OpenStack[1] for some parts of there platfrom [0] https://stackit.de/en/cloud/ https://stackit.de/en/cloud/ [1] https://schwarz.jobs.schwarz/job/Neckarsulm-&-Umgebung-Cloud-Infrastructure-Engineer-%28wmd%29/573464801/ https://schwarz.jobs.schwarz/job/Neckarsulm-&-Umgebung-Cloud...

atlgator 6y ago

The author doesn't realize AWS is for more than just ecommerce making the comparison highly suspect.

daralthus 6y ago

This is the same Lidl who spent €500m on a failed SAP rollout, right?

zeruch 6y ago

This is like a weird parallel of Fry's getting out of the grocery biz in California and selling electronics instead.

tewwi 6y ago

Too Lidl too late? (sorry)

Bayart 6y ago

Headlines you never expected to read.

ThinkBeat 6y ago

I welcome more non-American owned or hosted companies in this space but going from practically zero to take on AWS is a heck of a long way to go,and would require enormous amounts of capital. Hopefully, they can stat out with offerings that are especially attractive for European retailers or something like that.

cocoland 6y ago

As a novice engineer , i would like to ask the larger community few view point questions just out of curiosity. If you were the CTO/CIO and were tasked in building up a cloud that competes with behemoths , how would you do it. Of course it would be an "A Team" to do it , but what would be your priorities (e.g pick up cloud foundry and build things on top , take low hanging IaaS services) , there are so many aspects to it , how would you track progress and decide when to go out to market ? How would different teams (right from procurement , network , premises , to developers and ops personnel) be managed and seamlessly work ? What would be reasonable milestones and $$ spends ? :) Note this is purely out of curiosity..any links/blogs would be fine too :)