8 ms·

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 s

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.
    - jryle70 6y ago
      This is a weak argument, because that prudence should be extended to Lindl as well. Do you think Lindl would resist if Germany intelligence service (BND) asks, no matter how crazy that may sound now? What is implication for a client, says, in France or Poland?
      - rakoo 6y ago
        As a European I'd much rather my data be visible to Germany than the US. We have ties that go beyond commercial agreements, honesty is still something I can believe in concerning Germany, and if all goes bad Germany has far less power over me. I do agree with you though on the larger point: if caution should be exercised (and it should), then it's safe to assume every byte that goes on a server is to be considered visible to the government that hosts the content _and_ to the government under which the company operates
      - type0 6y ago
        US plays "Big" on surveillance intelligence online. BND and other European agencies could be as invasive when they get free hands, but the difference is the level of patriotism and privacy conciseness of the people running the business. Here I rather choose that my data stays on this side of the pound. Edit: what I mean is that I expect more willful cooperation from American companies just by the level of available evidence.
    - 6y ago
eb0la 6y ago
Also, retailers don't like AWS. For them using AWS is gifting money to your biggest natural predator.
- montenegrohugo 6y ago
  Wouldn't they have the same situation with LIDL? LIDL is also a (very) successful retailer, other retailers would have little incentive of helping them make more money. Also, I'm quite surprised about this announcement. I knew LIDL was in a really good position, but to attempt to compete in the cloud market is impressive. Good luck to them.
  - Torwald 6y ago
    Maybe, but it's not the "biggest natural predator" the one so big it already started to squeeze you out of your habitat by sheer quasi-monopoly power. Lidl is easier to keep in check. For at least WalMart (it's happening in Europe) and Aldi a fighting them on their home turf.
    - zaarn 6y ago
      Last time Walmart tried to get a position in germany they just failed outright, nobody accepted the Walmart shopping culture here, not even the employees.
      - collyw 6y ago
        What's Wallmart shopping culture? I seem to remember them from spending time in Mexico 20 years ago. It was just a large supermarket from what I remember. Nothing especially unusual that I can remember.
        eru 6y ago
        Fish and water I guess? Look up any of scores of articles that come up when you search for 'How to shop at Aldi?' (like eg https://www.gimmesomeoven.com/aldi-101-how-to-shop-at-aldi/ https://www.gimmesomeoven.com/aldi-101-how-to-shop-at-aldi/) to see how German shopping culture works. Oh, and Germans don't like greeters nor people to bag their groceries for them. When they see them, they suspect they could have saved 10 cents going to shop that doesn't have them instead. (And baggers also violate the German sense of social equality, I guess?)
ThePhysicist 6y ago
We host a lot of our infrastructure on Hetzner Cloud and are very happy, but to be fair it's a long long shot away from what AWS offers. You basically only have compute, storage and networking, only three datacenters and two regions to choose from and no managed services at all. You also can't do advanced networking like announcing your own IP addresses (Hetzner only allows that in colocation). You also only have a few instance types available, with RAM maxing out at 32 GB and no GPU servers available. Don't get me wrong I love Hetzner and their cloud offering and I think they're doing a fantastic job, but it is not comparable to platforms like AWS, Azure or GCP. It's good enough for simple use cases but I think most large companies that want to switch from on-premise would have a hard time adopting it since so many crucial features are missing. The LIDL cloud will have the same problem I think: They will probably build it on top of OpenStack or Kubernetes but will never reach feature parity with AWS, Azure or GCP. I think in their niche (retailing, logistics) they might be able to get some good adoption if they offer specific services and infrastructure based on their own use cases and experience, but this isn't really competition for AWS, at least not in the broader sense.
- d33 6y ago
  > RAM maxing out at 32 GB This part is just not accurate. I'm running their dedicated server with 256 GiB RAM right now.
  - sunaurus 6y ago
    Looking at https://www.hetzner.com/cloud https://www.hetzner.com/cloud, the top of the line dedicated option seems to be CCX51, which only has 32GB (edit: 128GB, I must have misread). Do you have some sort of special deal with them?
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - ThePhysicist 6y ago
    Me and the parent commenter are talking about the Hetzner cloud offering, where the largest instances have 32 GB of RAM (https://www.hetzner.de/cloud https://www.hetzner.de/cloud). Sure you can get a dedicated server there with much more RAM and you can host your own hardware in their colocation facilities, but that has nothing to do with cloud computing in the common understanding of the term.
StreamBright 6y ago
>> For a cloud provider, negotiating deals now when AMD is on the rise must be perfect. The prime factor driving negotiations is volume. It is going to be hard to beat AWS on this front. >> Beating AWS on EC2 pricing is easy. AWS EC2 pricing is insanely expensive. This is simply not true. Taking into account everything you get with EC2 it is in par with other providers. Factors: - multiple (redundant) tier1 networking routes - DDOS protection - firewall - redundant power (this almost never the case) - access management that can easily be tuned to meet with corporate security standards - network-attached storage that is very flexible with IOPS and size configurations - multiple different hardware offerings that can match your workload - elastic scalability (turn on when need more, turn off when no need) - control over resource allocation down to AZ and shared/non-shared level I am not saying that everybody needs these, but for those companies which do you won't be able to compete with a cheaper less powerful solution. These are the guys who can calculate what they are paying for and also know what they get, in detail. There are so many moving parts in a datacenter that you can get wrong (and companies regularly do) that hiring the best dc engineers is going to be the first challenge when building an AWS competitor unless you have a James Hamilton clone stashed somewhere.
- Neil44 6y ago
  Almost all decent datacentres and compute providers have these features, and it's far from unusual to have downtime in an EC2 reigion to the point where the standard advice is to spread across multiple reigions to avoid being caught out. EC2 does not have DDOS protection as standard its an additional cost service (AWS Shield). They will just charge you an insane ammount for the DDOS bandwidth as standard. Linode, DO etc all have these features at a fraction of the price.
  - StreamBright 6y ago
    >> Almost all decent datacentres and compute providers have these features Multiple tier1 networking routes? I seriously doubt that. Those vendors won't deal with small players. AWS used to have 160Gbps in NA 10 years ago. EC2 has DDOS protection, for one simple reason, if somebody DDOSing it it will impact many customers. And you can also use Shield. The point here is that you have options. What sort of DDOS protection Linode or DO have? How much bandwidth did they get? How many tier1 routes? There are the sort of questions you need to ask for a fair comparison, which absolutely not happing on HN. Many people think that building a data center is like creating a hello world application. I have seen this repeadetly, several times.
carlmr 6y ago
Also, at least German companies really don't like uploading data to US servers.
- brobdingnagians 6y ago
  I'm American and at this point I don't really like uploading data to US servers. I can totally understand the sentiment.
ryan-allen 6y ago
> 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. This has always been my problem with AWS. Cost savings might make sense for someone who actually needs 200 servers but if I just want one I'm paying 10 times as much for half as much in terms of performance. It rubs me the wrong way when a $70/mo AWS instance is more than twice as slow than a $10/mo 'traditional' VPS instance.
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > It rubs me the wrong way when a $70/mo AWS instance is more than twice as slow than a $10/mo 'traditional' VPS instance. Elastic compute of the type provided by EC2 and similar services (Google Compute Engine, etc.) is a fundamentally different service than simple VPS. AWS has something that is, or is very close to, a simple VPS in LightSail, and the pricing is pretty competitive with other VPS providers. LightSail doesn't have a $70/mo instance, the closest is $80/mo for a 16GB RAM, 4-core, 320GB SSD instance with 6TB of transfer quota. The least expensive is $3.50/mo, and $10/mo gets you 2GB RAM, 1 core, 60GB SSD, and 3TB transfer.
  - sweeneyrod 6y ago
    Hetzner prices are less than half of LightSail. They offer 4 cores/16GB RAM/320GB SSD for $28/month, and that comes with 20TB transfer rather than 6.
  - sah2ed 6y ago
    > Elastic compute of the type provided by EC2 and similar services (Google Compute Engine, etc.) is a fundamentally different service than simple VPS. What is the fundamental difference that you speak of? At least to me, the only major difference is that while AWS markets their VMs as EC2 because they were designed for elasticity (i.e variable compute workloads), which explains the elastic in the name EC2; VPS providers OTOH market their VMs as a cheaper alternative to dedicated servers (i.e. fixed compute workloads). The difference in pricing largely follows from the difference in design since the cloud shines when your resource needs are elastic. VPSes shine when your resource needs are largely inelastic.
BiteCode_dev 6y ago
Also, "my data is handled by a company under the EU law" is quite a good sale pitch these days.
- loltyler1 6y ago
  It is not.
  - mprev 6y ago
    You'll need to give some more detail. When I worked with a European cloud host, customers in Germany demanded German data centres and EU ownership. I've seen enough people/companies ask for that to convince me there's at least some demand. What's your reason for saying it's not a good differentiator?
    - gizmo 6y ago
      That's a specific thing in Germany. Not true for Europe as a whole.
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > Also, "my data is handled by a company under the EU law" is quite a good sale pitch these days. Everyone operating in the EU is under EU law, including Amazon, so it's certainly not a competitive pitch vs. Amazon, however much it might be on a checklist of things customers are looking for.
  - mprev 6y ago
    From the perspective of a customer who cares about these things, though, there is a difference between a non-EU company bound by EU law and an EU head quartered company. I'm not saying it's enough to build an AWS-sized business or that Lidl is in a position to do it but there are cloud hosts who sell themselves specifically on that, such Exoscale.com
  - BiteCode_dev 6y ago
romanovcode 6y ago
What I really liked about Hetzner is that they provide VirtIO drivers so you can install Windows.
mongol 6y ago
Also, for online retailers to put their eggs in Amazon's basket means they put their destiny in the hands of a competitor. Going for example with Azure is safer from this perspective. That said, Lidl is closer to Amazon than Microsoft, from that point of view.
radiator 6y ago
Hetzner Cloud exists and some efforts to automate Kubernetes deployments exist as well. It is of course not as polished as similar k8s AWS solutions, but as you said yourself it is much cheaper.
peterwwillis 6y ago
> 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. Not really. AWS is largely independent service products with a few shared core services. K8s is just the core services. Each AWS service is effectively its own product. Regardless of what tech you have in the background, you would have to make a complete product to compete with AWS's version. You would still have to build an entire customer interface and documentation and do product support. Or you could build one giant monolith product that isn't decomposeable into services, and at that point you're no longer an AWS competitor, you're just another weird PaaS that enterprise won't touch. Enterprise is a whale, and you need whales. Looking at k8s like it's a business solution is like looking at a wheel+tire and thinking it's a car.

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.
  - jryle70 6y ago
    This is a weak argument, because that prudence should be extended to Lindl as well. Do you think Lindl would resist if Germany intelligence service (BND) asks, no matter how crazy that may sound now? What is implication for a client, says, in France or Poland?
    - rakoo 6y ago
      As a European I'd much rather my data be visible to Germany than the US. We have ties that go beyond commercial agreements, honesty is still something I can believe in concerning Germany, and if all goes bad Germany has far less power over me. I do agree with you though on the larger point: if caution should be exercised (and it should), then it's safe to assume every byte that goes on a server is to be considered visible to the government that hosts the content _and_ to the government under which the company operates
    - type0 6y ago
      US plays "Big" on surveillance intelligence online. BND and other European agencies could be as invasive when they get free hands, but the difference is the level of patriotism and privacy conciseness of the people running the business. Here I rather choose that my data stays on this side of the pound. Edit: what I mean is that I expect more willful cooperation from American companies just by the level of available evidence.
  - 6y ago

eb0la 6y ago

Also, retailers don't like AWS. For them using AWS is gifting money to your biggest natural predator.

montenegrohugo 6y ago
Wouldn't they have the same situation with LIDL? LIDL is also a (very) successful retailer, other retailers would have little incentive of helping them make more money. Also, I'm quite surprised about this announcement. I knew LIDL was in a really good position, but to attempt to compete in the cloud market is impressive. Good luck to them.
- Torwald 6y ago
  Maybe, but it's not the "biggest natural predator" the one so big it already started to squeeze you out of your habitat by sheer quasi-monopoly power. Lidl is easier to keep in check. For at least WalMart (it's happening in Europe) and Aldi a fighting them on their home turf.
  - zaarn 6y ago
    Last time Walmart tried to get a position in germany they just failed outright, nobody accepted the Walmart shopping culture here, not even the employees.
    - collyw 6y ago
      What's Wallmart shopping culture? I seem to remember them from spending time in Mexico 20 years ago. It was just a large supermarket from what I remember. Nothing especially unusual that I can remember.
      - eru 6y ago
        Fish and water I guess? Look up any of scores of articles that come up when you search for 'How to shop at Aldi?' (like eg https://www.gimmesomeoven.com/aldi-101-how-to-shop-at-aldi/ https://www.gimmesomeoven.com/aldi-101-how-to-shop-at-aldi/) to see how German shopping culture works. Oh, and Germans don't like greeters nor people to bag their groceries for them. When they see them, they suspect they could have saved 10 cents going to shop that doesn't have them instead. (And baggers also violate the German sense of social equality, I guess?)

ThePhysicist 6y ago

We host a lot of our infrastructure on Hetzner Cloud and are very happy, but to be fair it's a long long shot away from what AWS offers. You basically only have compute, storage and networking, only three datacenters and two regions to choose from and no managed services at all. You also can't do advanced networking like announcing your own IP addresses (Hetzner only allows that in colocation). You also only have a few instance types available, with RAM maxing out at 32 GB and no GPU servers available. Don't get me wrong I love Hetzner and their cloud offering and I think they're doing a fantastic job, but it is not comparable to platforms like AWS, Azure or GCP. It's good enough for simple use cases but I think most large companies that want to switch from on-premise would have a hard time adopting it since so many crucial features are missing. The LIDL cloud will have the same problem I think: They will probably build it on top of OpenStack or Kubernetes but will never reach feature parity with AWS, Azure or GCP. I think in their niche (retailing, logistics) they might be able to get some good adoption if they offer specific services and infrastructure based on their own use cases and experience, but this isn't really competition for AWS, at least not in the broader sense.

d33 6y ago
> RAM maxing out at 32 GB This part is just not accurate. I'm running their dedicated server with 256 GiB RAM right now.
- sunaurus 6y ago
  Looking at https://www.hetzner.com/cloud https://www.hetzner.com/cloud, the top of the line dedicated option seems to be CCX51, which only has 32GB (edit: 128GB, I must have misread). Do you have some sort of special deal with them?
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- ThePhysicist 6y ago
  Me and the parent commenter are talking about the Hetzner cloud offering, where the largest instances have 32 GB of RAM (https://www.hetzner.de/cloud https://www.hetzner.de/cloud). Sure you can get a dedicated server there with much more RAM and you can host your own hardware in their colocation facilities, but that has nothing to do with cloud computing in the common understanding of the term.

StreamBright 6y ago

>> For a cloud provider, negotiating deals now when AMD is on the rise must be perfect. The prime factor driving negotiations is volume. It is going to be hard to beat AWS on this front. >> Beating AWS on EC2 pricing is easy. AWS EC2 pricing is insanely expensive. This is simply not true. Taking into account everything you get with EC2 it is in par with other providers. Factors: - multiple (redundant) tier1 networking routes - DDOS protection - firewall - redundant power (this almost never the case) - access management that can easily be tuned to meet with corporate security standards - network-attached storage that is very flexible with IOPS and size configurations - multiple different hardware offerings that can match your workload - elastic scalability (turn on when need more, turn off when no need) - control over resource allocation down to AZ and shared/non-shared level I am not saying that everybody needs these, but for those companies which do you won't be able to compete with a cheaper less powerful solution. These are the guys who can calculate what they are paying for and also know what they get, in detail. There are so many moving parts in a datacenter that you can get wrong (and companies regularly do) that hiring the best dc engineers is going to be the first challenge when building an AWS competitor unless you have a James Hamilton clone stashed somewhere.

Neil44 6y ago
Almost all decent datacentres and compute providers have these features, and it's far from unusual to have downtime in an EC2 reigion to the point where the standard advice is to spread across multiple reigions to avoid being caught out. EC2 does not have DDOS protection as standard its an additional cost service (AWS Shield). They will just charge you an insane ammount for the DDOS bandwidth as standard. Linode, DO etc all have these features at a fraction of the price.
- StreamBright 6y ago
  >> Almost all decent datacentres and compute providers have these features Multiple tier1 networking routes? I seriously doubt that. Those vendors won't deal with small players. AWS used to have 160Gbps in NA 10 years ago. EC2 has DDOS protection, for one simple reason, if somebody DDOSing it it will impact many customers. And you can also use Shield. The point here is that you have options. What sort of DDOS protection Linode or DO have? How much bandwidth did they get? How many tier1 routes? There are the sort of questions you need to ask for a fair comparison, which absolutely not happing on HN. Many people think that building a data center is like creating a hello world application. I have seen this repeadetly, several times.

carlmr 6y ago

Also, at least German companies really don't like uploading data to US servers.

brobdingnagians 6y ago
I'm American and at this point I don't really like uploading data to US servers. I can totally understand the sentiment.

ryan-allen 6y ago

> 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. This has always been my problem with AWS. Cost savings might make sense for someone who actually needs 200 servers but if I just want one I'm paying 10 times as much for half as much in terms of performance. It rubs me the wrong way when a $70/mo AWS instance is more than twice as slow than a $10/mo 'traditional' VPS instance.

dragonwriter 6y ago
> It rubs me the wrong way when a $70/mo AWS instance is more than twice as slow than a $10/mo 'traditional' VPS instance. Elastic compute of the type provided by EC2 and similar services (Google Compute Engine, etc.) is a fundamentally different service than simple VPS. AWS has something that is, or is very close to, a simple VPS in LightSail, and the pricing is pretty competitive with other VPS providers. LightSail doesn't have a $70/mo instance, the closest is $80/mo for a 16GB RAM, 4-core, 320GB SSD instance with 6TB of transfer quota. The least expensive is $3.50/mo, and $10/mo gets you 2GB RAM, 1 core, 60GB SSD, and 3TB transfer.
- sweeneyrod 6y ago
  Hetzner prices are less than half of LightSail. They offer 4 cores/16GB RAM/320GB SSD for $28/month, and that comes with 20TB transfer rather than 6.
- sah2ed 6y ago
  > Elastic compute of the type provided by EC2 and similar services (Google Compute Engine, etc.) is a fundamentally different service than simple VPS. What is the fundamental difference that you speak of? At least to me, the only major difference is that while AWS markets their VMs as EC2 because they were designed for elasticity (i.e variable compute workloads), which explains the elastic in the name EC2; VPS providers OTOH market their VMs as a cheaper alternative to dedicated servers (i.e. fixed compute workloads). The difference in pricing largely follows from the difference in design since the cloud shines when your resource needs are elastic. VPSes shine when your resource needs are largely inelastic.

BiteCode_dev 6y ago

Also, "my data is handled by a company under the EU law" is quite a good sale pitch these days.

loltyler1 6y ago
It is not.
- mprev 6y ago
  You'll need to give some more detail. When I worked with a European cloud host, customers in Germany demanded German data centres and EU ownership. I've seen enough people/companies ask for that to convince me there's at least some demand. What's your reason for saying it's not a good differentiator?
  - gizmo 6y ago
    That's a specific thing in Germany. Not true for Europe as a whole.
dragonwriter 6y ago
> Also, "my data is handled by a company under the EU law" is quite a good sale pitch these days. Everyone operating in the EU is under EU law, including Amazon, so it's certainly not a competitive pitch vs. Amazon, however much it might be on a checklist of things customers are looking for.
- mprev 6y ago
  From the perspective of a customer who cares about these things, though, there is a difference between a non-EU company bound by EU law and an EU head quartered company. I'm not saying it's enough to build an AWS-sized business or that Lidl is in a position to do it but there are cloud hosts who sell themselves specifically on that, such Exoscale.com
- BiteCode_dev 6y ago

romanovcode 6y ago

What I really liked about Hetzner is that they provide VirtIO drivers so you can install Windows.

mongol 6y ago

Also, for online retailers to put their eggs in Amazon's basket means they put their destiny in the hands of a competitor. Going for example with Azure is safer from this perspective. That said, Lidl is closer to Amazon than Microsoft, from that point of view.

radiator 6y ago

Hetzner Cloud exists and some efforts to automate Kubernetes deployments exist as well. It is of course not as polished as similar k8s AWS solutions, but as you said yourself it is much cheaper.

peterwwillis 6y ago

> 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. Not really. AWS is largely independent service products with a few shared core services. K8s is just the core services. Each AWS service is effectively its own product. Regardless of what tech you have in the background, you would have to make a complete product to compete with AWS's version. You would still have to build an entire customer interface and documentation and do product support. Or you could build one giant monolith product that isn't decomposeable into services, and at that point you're no longer an AWS competitor, you're just another weird PaaS that enterprise won't touch. Enterprise is a whale, and you need whales. Looking at k8s like it's a business solution is like looking at a wheel+tire and thinking it's a car.