13 ms·

Stackit: Cloud and Colocation

236 points by FlyingSnake 5y ago

fullstop 5y ago
I'm not familiar with large European companies, but is this kind of like Aldi offering AWS-like services? Clancy's Cloud Compute, and Casa Mamita's Message Queues?
- Keyframe 5y ago
  Yeah, Lidl and Kaufland.. kind of absurd, just like amazon launching computer infrastructure project.
KingOfCoders 5y ago
Some of my customers in German Healthcare startups might be interested, they get harassed all the time for using AWS.
- TheNoxier 5y ago
  [dead]
mkj 5y ago
"Get in touch" for signup does not seem like a rival to AWS.
- junon 5y ago
  Very German. Tech companies here don't like open signups. I have absolutely no idea why. Not a single SaaS startup I've worked for or have worked with here has had open signups.
  - trh0awayman 5y ago
    I think that's because there is no real "open signup" for starting a company here, either. It's not like people here are legally allowed to try out a business before officially starting it - that would be highly illegal. In the US, you can spin up and spin down businesses the way you would an AWS VM. That, and Germans value contracts/stability over many other things - including the customers themselves.
    - junon 5y ago
      None of what you said about companies is true in Germany. You're able to sign up for a company Steuernummer easier than in the US, in fact.
      - trh0awayman 5y ago
        A tax ID is not a company. I've started companies in both countries - the burden and costs of starting and running one in Germany is far higher. In the US, I can start selling muffins, wooden furniture, whatever to my friends, family, and neighbors without doing anything. I can walk into a local grocery store and convince the owner to carry my products. I can test out markets and use Stripe, Paypal, Patreon: any payment service I want without doing a single thing. At most, I just have to pay my taxes at the very end of the year. I can do all that while working 1, even 2 jobs if I want. I can pick up a shift at Uber, then work on my business. You can't just start an Etsy store here. None of those things are possible here and are all underlined by ones appetite for risk. Handling VAT is a literal nightmare. Monthly invoices, dealing with the Finanzamt on a monthly basis for the first year or two. Everything comes with stipulations/exceptions and requires a careful reading of the law - which of course, is impossible for anyone to understand, so you're forced to hire a lawyer. It costs like 20 bucks to dissolve an LLC. How much does it cost to dissolve an UG? I wasn't trying to insinuate that one country is better than another. With the burdens comes stability. My company is rock solid here. There will basically never be a competitor for me, because the burden is too high for anyone to stomach.
- bayindirh 5y ago
  Oracle's cloud also completes registration and provision by hand. Also, not everyone gets an account. If they can get a decent traction, they can scale-up step by step. Rome didn't got built in a day.
  - WatchDog 5y ago
    I’ve signed up for oracle cloud account and started using it without any hand holding.
    - bayindirh 5y ago
      My account provision took almost one day. Some friends' accounts didn't get through and got opened.
    - sergiotapia 5y ago
      Can I ask why you went with Oracle Cloud? It sounds very strange, like onboarding your employees with Blackberry phones.
      - bayindirh 5y ago
        Speedy ARM machines with plenty of resources for free. More than enough to play with hobby stuff and see where ARM is going.
        sergiotapia 5y ago
        I see, I thought you were using it for business
        bayindirh 5y ago
        Ha, nope. We have enough servers on prem. Colocation/cloud doesn't fit for our stuff (HPC) anyway.
      - charcircuit 5y ago
- FlyingSnake 5y ago
  Most likely they have a different enterprise sales pipeline for their target audience, e.g. EU Businesses.
- jeroenhd 5y ago
  The contact form mentions that they're only looking to serve enterprise customers right now, they probably want to prevent small accounts from swamping the system while they're working on expanding their availability.
m00dy 5y ago
looks like we are witnessing the moment for the future of cloud in europe
- grnmamba 5y ago
  Ovh and hetzner have existed for ages. And you can actually purchase services from them.
  - 0des 5y ago
    I've never had AWS out of nowhere threaten to terminate my account I've had for months unless I send them a photo of my passport and ID next to it. Looking at you Hetzner.
- luciusdomitius 5y ago
  No. Because: 1) AWS has very serious regulatory capture in Europe - e.g. for banking, government, possibly else it is the only one approved solution. 2) Those pension-fund owned German enterprises are legendary bad at IT. The best way you could describe the culture there is anti-agile & anti-meritocratic.
sidcool 5y ago
The title seems opinionated. Link does not have any indication of an AWS competition. The services are hardly close to what AWS offers.
- pluc 5y ago
  Anything that hosts anything is seen as a "competitor to AWS" since some people are able to boil down AWS to a "cloud host". Admittedly they've grown to do much much more specific things, but one could argue that's the center of their offering.
  - marcosdumay 5y ago
    Anything that hosts anything competes with AWS in some way. AWS will certainly do more things than any competitor, but it doesn't mean it's not competing.
- detaro 5y ago
  Yes. If I remember right Schwarz Group doesn't use AWS because they don't want to give money and data to a big competitor, but that doesn't make their hosting setup an "AWS competitor". And as far as I can see the site also doesn't claim anything like that, so this is a clear case of "don't editorizalize titles!"
- moonchrome 5y ago
  To be honest it took some scrolling but it does seem to offer some cloud services like managed databases, elasticsearch, rabbitmq, redis, k8s - this is not just barebone VM host.
- luciusdomitius 5y ago
  Well you have a kubernetes cluser + various dbs and message brokers. This is what 99% of clients actually use in AWS. It makes sense that exactly this is part of the minimum viable product.
- lozenge 5y ago
  Nor do they appear to have actually launched.
fguerraz 5y ago
I'm surprised they didn't call it Silvercrest Web Services
- mattiasberge 5y ago
  Dulani Web Services
- Keyframe 5y ago
  Parkside services
- pluc 5y ago
  BWS, cause if you're going for A you better be B?
- daneel_w 5y ago
  Crusti Croc Colo.
- scoutt 5y ago
  I can guess why... Everybody would recall that cheap kitchen appliance that broke within the first month after purchase.
- deleted 5y ago
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deleted 5y ago
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pluc 5y ago
STACKIT totally sounds like a legitimate AWS rival. It says so right in the name!
- DonHopkins 5y ago
  The Royal Society For Putting Things On Top of Other Things approves of STACKIT! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFrdqQZ8FFc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFrdqQZ8FFc
- flipbrad 5y ago
  Embarrassing "We are STACKT" typo right in the middle of the page, too.
leberle 5y ago
oO "you can launch a VM here" is not really a "rival to AWS" tbh...
eatonphil 5y ago
Is that a bigger deal than OVH or Hertzner? I'm in the US but I'm a big fan of OVH. Run all my development on a bare metal OVH server in Canada.
- grnmamba 5y ago
  Right now this is just a marketing page with no way to create an account.
sva_ 5y ago
Lidl, the company that wasted 500 million Euro to integrate their system with SAP, but failed?
- coffeeblack 5y ago
  “So now what do we do with all those programmers we hired for the ERP project?” “I have an idea…”
  - toyg 5y ago
    I seriously doubt ERP programmers can or want to be repurposed to web stuff.
- luciusdomitius 5y ago
  To be honest, Lidl is far from the only company with a failed billion-dollar SAP implementation. In recent years this is becoming the standard.
- mschuster91 5y ago
  Failures and problems with SAP integration are incredibly common, I would not be placing blame so hard on LIDL themselves. The root cause is usually that SAP goes for any new product / addon to whoever they feel the market leader is in the respective area, models their processes (usually without questioning them too much) and then packages this as a new product or addon. New customers then have to either adapt their processes to the process of the "market leader" (no matter if they are fit or not for the purpose or are actually efficient) or they have to adapt the SAP workflows - and that is where it gets hairy as fuck and where the problems arise: - ABAP programmers are low in supply and high in demand (as the role requires both DBA and general coding skills as well as a ton of SAP-specific knowledge and the patience to deal with the bullshit that is the SAP UI) - add to that that most people buy SAP skills from third party consultants with all the bullshit that comes with that (inadequate oversight, juniors being sold as seniors, near- and offshoring with timezone and language differences as well as cultural differences) - the further you deviate from the SAP-prepackaged process the harder any patch or heaven forbid major update becomes. If you fuck it up badly enough you are just finished with releasing the last patch and then you already are in crunch mode again for the next patch. In my opinion and experience SAP is only relevant these days because of lock-in and "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" effect and because they are relatively quick at implementing law changes as code, not because the people who actually have to use it want to use it - quite to the contrary. And, speaking as a German, the fact that this company is just about the only major IT company that Germany has is both extremely sad and exemplary for German IT importance in general at the same time.
unfocussed_mike 5y ago
So it's a bunch of cost-effective web services, and then in the middle a lathe, a chainsaw and a heated towel rail?
- fullstop 5y ago
  The Aisle of Shame, at least for Aldi.
  - unfocussed_mike 5y ago
    There was a 3D printer in the Aldi Aisle Of Shame at one point. Not a bad one either. Not seen a 3D printer in the "middle of Lidl" yet but I expect to.
    - fullstop 5y ago
      I have a bathroom sink faucet which came from the Aisle Of Shame. It's actually very nice!
toyg 5y ago
How would I know this is Lidl? It's not in the references, which are underwhelming. From the site, this is no different from dozens of other consultancy-oriented cloud providers.
- mlatu 5y ago
  it says so at the bottom of the page: "The Schwarz Group consists of the well-known brands Lidl and Kaufland, as well as Schwarz Produktion and waste and recycling management companies."
- johnfarrelldev 5y ago
  > The Schwarz Group covers the entire value chain of the food trade like no other trading company, from production to sales to materials management. Digitalization and its pressure to change are noticeable in all business areas. To continue to successfully serve rising customer needs, new digital business models must be iterated even faster – and this while the data and system infrastructure becomes increasingly complex. As the number 1 in the European retail business, the Schwarz Group knows that those who do not digitize will lose market share in the long term. Lidl are part of the Schwarz Group.
- jacquesm 5y ago
  "STACKIT is the digital brand of Schwarz IT and therefore part of the IT organisation of one of the world’s largest retail groups. The Schwarz Group consists of the well-known brands Lidl and Kaufland, as well as Schwarz Produktion and waste and recycling management companies."
- mtmail 5y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwarz_Gruppe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwarz_Gruppe is the parent of Lidl. And the Schwarz IT business group runs StackIT. There is also Schwarz Mobility for fleet management of company cars. I don't think it's meant to be associated with the Lidl brand.
jacquesm 5y ago
I think they'll have a hard time finding people to staff that, Lidl has a long history of underpaying and abusing their personnel and maybe they think that if Amazon can get away with that that they qualify at some level but datacenter employees are not going to like being dealt with like that. Lidl as an employer has a trackrecord that would cause me to think twice about hosting with them, no matter what the price. That said, being part of the same 'group' there might be enough insulation to avoid this link damaging the company, but since the Lidl connection is proudly mentioned on each page in the footer. I think that they either don't realize that it might be a risk to declare that so openly or they don't care in the same way that scammers don't care about you figuring out they are scammers, if you are offended by that then they probably don't want to hire you because you just might be aware of your market value. For some more information about Lidl employer-employee relationships: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lidl#Working_conditions_and_labour_rights https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lidl#Working_conditions_and_la...
- throwaway4good 5y ago
  Whereas I hear the pay at the Amazon fulfillment centers is really good???!
  - deleted 5y ago
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  - lnxg33k1 5y ago
    Yeah I was also a bit confused about that, like few months ago 2 employee had to die during a storm just because Jeff Pesos couldn't afford to keep a fulfillment center closed and people still work at AWS without conscience issues?
  - jacquesm 5y ago
    Yes, that must be why Amazon works hard to ensure their employees don't unionize. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/16/technology/amazon-unions-virginia.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/16/technology/amazon-unions-... Who needs collective bargaining power if the pay is so great.
jmillikin 5y ago
> STACKIT services are currently offered to the Group’s internal > customers and are continuously optimised according to their > requirements. In the future, it is also planned to offer the > services on the external market.
- MrBuddyCasino 5y ago
  I bet their "internal customers" is mostly their bottom of the barrel kaufland.de marketplace.
  - carstenhag 5y ago
    You don't think the entire schwarz group would need databases, network stuff, VMs etc? The Kaufland marketplace for taken over from Real.
aeyes 5y ago
This product looks like it doesn't respect the license of Elastic: https://www.stackit.de/en/product/elasticsearch https://www.stackit.de/en/product/elasticsearch
bitlax 5y ago
> "rival" Sometimes people will post a React template on HN with the title "How to Build Twitter."
londons_explore 5y ago
So, when I buy a $5 bag of potatoes from lidl, how much of that money is going to pay for these servers? I would hope that for a retail business like Lidl, far less than 1% of the revenue goes into IT staffing and systems costs. I worry that the number is closer to 10%.
- tssva 5y ago
  Lately I would consider myself lucky to find a bag of potatoes at Lidl. In the US at least they seem to be struggling to keep shelves stocked. I have 2 Lidl locations within 15 minutes of me and for the last few months the shelves have been pretty bare at both. To fill them up they have started stocking many more name brands which are not priced competitively with other grocery stores. I understand there are currently supply issues but the Aldi across the street from one of the Lidl locations isn't having this severe of an issue. The traditional grocery store chains in the area also don't seem to be having anywhere near the same level of supply issues even for their store brands.
athenot 5y ago
Cloud Hosting, in the Center Aisle of Lidl, next to the other random items for sale. In all fairness, this move makes sense to monetize any surplus they have in DC capacity. In terms of competition, their offering competes more with Equinix and the like than with AWS.
gpjanik 5y ago
Wasn't sure if April fools or not. German companies have launched so many of those "rivals" to AWS by now, all of them require you to call someone/send a letter/FAX to create a VM. I wonder if they understand that the success of cloud, SaaS and generally majority of modern, scalable businesses comes from the fact that it _can_ be self-served.
- exar0815 5y ago
  Strange, I never had to send a single FAX in my life in germany. Especially not for any cloud offerings located in EU/germany. I would LOVE to see proof for that.
  - vdfs 5y ago
    Some even use Telegram
  - belter 5y ago
    German Newspaper (2018): "...Two-thirds of German companies regularly use faxes, whereas only half of them use video conferencing technologies, and just one-third use messaging services or online collaboration tools..." https://www.handelsblatt.com/english/companies/digitization-the-fax-is-dead-long-live-the-fax/23583118.html https://www.handelsblatt.com/english/companies/digitization-...
    - progre 5y ago
      Not proof. The question was about cloud companies.
      - belter 5y ago
        The second part of the comment yes. The first was about how pervasive the use of fax was within German business. But in Japan it's worst: "Japan’s reliance on fax machines lambasted by coronavirus doctor": https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/coronavirus-japan-fax-machine-online-hanko-a9501906.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/coronavirus-ja... "Japan Can't Get Rid of the Fax Machine With Offices Demanding It Stays": https://www.insider.com/japan-cant-get-rid-the-fax-machine-offices-demanding-stay-2021-7 https://www.insider.com/japan-cant-get-rid-the-fax-machine-o...
jtwaleson 5y ago
Cloud AND colocation? That’s not an AWS competitor, that’s a boring data center with some software on top of it.
- jhgb 5y ago
  I thought that AWS was "a boring data center with some software on top of it"?
  - jtwaleson 5y ago
    Haha, it depends on where you put the emphasis. I would say AWS is cloud services that happen to use data centers under the hood.
    - hansel_der 5y ago
      i wonder when cloud services will have fully migrated to serverless and we can finally do away with the datacenters once and for all.
Copenjin 5y ago
Hetzner is more of a rival to AWS than this for now.
- wongarsu 5y ago
  And this is really more positioned as a rival to Hetzner than to AWS, for now.
  - mxxc 5y ago
    the hype in terms of money they can pour here could potentially be a factor, as opposed to "feature completeness" right now.
- usrusr 5y ago
  ..and when you are a customer there you know that you are core business and not just on some service that might be ended any day due to some strategic coin flip. I have no idea how these sidecar business ever establish themselves in terms of trust (same certainly applies to early years AWS)
rr808 5y ago
I wonder how secure AWS really is. Most people need some VPCs, some VMs, maybe k8s and a database all with global redundancy. Skills and training is almost the biggest barrier but with Terraform and/or some standardized APIs I'd think most mid level firms could switch in a month or two.
luciusdomitius 5y ago
So, that's what Schwarz IT has been so actively recruiting for. I got contacted 3+ time, however each time it was a rather low tech position, right under some technically illiterate MBA chap, so I did not even bother submitting a resume. I have serious doubt they would be able to mount a serious challenge to AWS. These German companies - DB, DHL, SAP just don't have cultures meritocratic enough to be competitive with the new boys. Not everything in the world is a post office or a rebar manufacture line.
- pluc 5y ago
  There's plenty of EU-based companies they need to challenge before they can challenge AWS (Hetzner, OVH, Upcloud, Raptr..) I don't see it happening, at least not with what they're showing.
- carstenhag 5y ago
  I was an employee of the Kaufland IT back then, which then was integrated to the Schwarz IT some years ago. Only a small team worked on StackIt back then - it probably grew the last years, but most will not work on this. I also don't think they will be a serious contendor to the current companies
- ivan_gammel 5y ago
  Those Schwarz digital branches have the culture and structure that is not different from Berlin startups, only a bit more mature. I think they are capable.
andrew_eit 5y ago
"You need scalable enterprise cloud solutions for digital business processes while maintaining complete data integrity?" Nitpicking here, but my god, can German companies/universities/organizations please start paying for native English speakers to do their copy-writing and STOP translating directly from German? It's "Do you need". Not "You need..." This is the typical translation of the German marketing "Du brauchst <blah>?" or "Du bist ein <blah>? Dann...". I see pattern this all the time, such as "You are a student who wants to work on innovating projects? Then apply...". This may sound like a rant, but I genuinely think these little details would go a long way to actually showing that the German economy does have some sort of international mindset. This persistence in sticking to these wrong ways just makes me think that 'OK this is another conservative old-school minded German company trying to play unicorn'. If there's no attention to detail or care for the little things on your front-page marketing website - your first contact with your customer - it just leaves me with a bad feeling about the parts I don't see. I don't know why it frustrates me enough to write a comment in the middle of the day, I guess I really can't understand how global German corporations still, as a rule all make this same error, which I suspect is just the tip of the iceberg of a larger symptom of not wanting to think outside/beyond the DACH bubble. And I feel a sense of sadness that such a country with great prospects just drags its feet lazily into the the future. Edit: I also see this all the time in Email correspondence, you can immediately tell if a person is a native German speaker because they don't capitalize the first letter in an English email after "Dear X, we are writing <blah>" (which would be 100% correct in German, but somehow no one teaches this in English classes in Germany that in English it is capitalized). For a country that loves rules, this drives me mad. Edit2: This is definitely a rant and it triggered me emotionally for some odd reason. I concede that my interpretation is quite exaggerated, so please do excuse me! I'll leave the comment however because I'm curious to know whether any others feel the same way. Edit3: I will also say that translating between German and English is hard as there are some fundamental differences in their structure. There are very colloquial ways to say or not say certain things. That is why native speakers are essential for such things. Edit4: Please take this comment with a pinch of salt. This is the rant of an fatigued expat who decided to blow some off steam about the oddities of their host country that drive them bananas. For posterity, I will say there at least 10 amazing wonderful things about German culture that I love, for each odd cultural thing. But you know, at some point when you see something for the umpteenth time, something snaps inside of you and it all comes out, especially on a mid-week day like a Wednesday.
k__ 5y ago
I will wait for the Aldi offering.
KingOfCoders 5y ago
2 questions: Cheaper than AWS? Managed Postgres? [Edit] Looks like yes to both.
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jillesvangurp 5y ago
If you discount the title, which is a bit click-baity and not actually featured on the website, this makes a bit more sense. This is one of several companies in Germany reluctant to host with the existing US based cloud providers. So, they decided to use off the shelf software (openstack probably) and stick it on computers in data centers that they own. That's of course not an alternative to AWS other than that it is a self-hosted cloud and as such an alternative to not self-hosting it. Nothing wrong with self hosting stuff. Lots of companies do that for all sorts of reasons. White labeling it and selling your self hosted cloud to others is also not that uncommon. There's an enormous long tail of data centers that do exactly that. Lidl is big enough that they probably could justify spending a little extra on hardware and doing a little side business with like minded German companies. It's a weird side effect of a lot of relatively large companies in Germany that are effectively family owned businesses that just became very large over time that don't like the idea of not being in control of their own assets and infrastructure. They are old fashioned, don't like change, and not very flexible. The added dimension here in Germany is that a lot of these companies have yet to modernize their IT and are relatively clueless on that front. Lidl would be a good example of such a company. And not for a lack of trying. They are the same company that botched their deal with SAP after spending half a billion on them by insisting on so many customizations that the project just never shipped and they pulled the plug. They want custom everything and they ask for stuff they think they need without understanding their own needs. It's a combination of stubbornness, arrogance and corporate stupidity. That same reflex is driving them to do this. They could probably have saved quite a bit of money by just using existing cloud services. I actually have to deal with this sentiment as we are based in Germany with our company. A lot of Germans are mildly psychotic/irrational about things in the cloud. I've met Germans that insist that financial service can't be hosted in AWS. Horse shit of course, many banks in Germany do exactly that and Amazon has a nice data center in Frankfurt for that. It's one of their main sites in Europe as it is a big market and they'll comply with whatever to keep that business going. Google Cloud is currently what we host on because it is good, cheap, and easy to use. But we have customers that don't like that at all and we are looking into dedicated setups for these customers on various German providers. They'll get the same stuff at a great premium that we will charge them for without any shame. These services are typically more expensive, harder to use, less reliable, and more poorly supported. There is no upside other than the "hosted in Germany" thing. Pay more for way less. Their choice but a huge PITA for our operations.
jpomykala 5y ago
Electricity availability: 99.98% / month
_druu 5y ago
> STACKIT is the digital brand of Schwarz IT ... Having worked with them, I can assure you, it's gonna be a disaster. I've been called into a project as a consultant, and it took them over 3 months to even get any credentials for VPN, let alone repositories. I just can't see this working out in any shape or form.
- jpomykala 5y ago
  I also worked with people from Schwarz and some smaller company who manages some business data. It's going to be a disaster. I'm not even surprised that you need to 'Get in touch'. They do pretty many things manually and simply wrong. Client is processing large Excel file for 4 days? Somebody simply kills the job and the whole process starts again. Big words, cheap execution.
- mxxc 5y ago
  i mean right now one can't even sign up properly. but obviously since they want to compete on a platform level as opposed to whatever you were doing for them, surely "not being able to create an account" isn't gonna draw users away from gcp/aws.
- mkdirp 5y ago
  > it took them over 3 months to even get any credentials for VPN, let alone repositories. What you're saying is, you can just join, get paid, and do nothing? Where do I sign up?
  - _druu 5y ago
    That worked for 2 weeks... Then they didn't want to pay any more for me waiting. So really not worth it
mwexler 5y ago
I have this vision that all the products will be "similar" but just different enough from the originals to avoid a lawsuit, just like the stores. So, Radshift, S2+1 storage, Appflower, DynomiteDB, etc.
nik736 5y ago
As far as I can see they don't even operate their own network and according to RIPE they don't own any IPs. How is this supposed to work?
FlyingSnake 5y ago
This was discussed 2 years ago on HN and had some interesting comments and insights from insiders¹ [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23151069 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23151069
Garlef 5y ago
Not a single mention of infrastructure as code or serverless ... :shrug:
anyfactor 5y ago
The only companies that have justifiable merit of saying they have launched a rival to AWS are either government backed entities, Snowflake or IBM and/or a joint venture of server manufacturers. I have no clue why IBM cloud has such a poor market position considering how dominant of a business it was. But there is still hope. A combined forces attempt could be a viable strategy. Snowflake has changed cloud service providers several times to my knowledge. In my opinion their offering and business philosophy is unique to allow themselves to venture into this business. For government backed cloud you have Alibaba cloud as an example. Regional cloud service peovider with government funding or active monitoring is an evetuality in my opinion. The Ukraine situation proves my point. Keep an eye out on India for this. I feel like the govt is gonna give it a shot before 2030. The reason behind this deserves its own article.
- ShroudedNight 5y ago
  I don't know what the status is now, but back when I was working for IBM, their Bluemix offering demonstrated a complete lack of commitment to operational excellence with seemingly routine downtime, with an undercurrent of "It's 1700, time to sod off for the day" regardless of the state of their service. It also didn't help that they seemed intent on paying 35+% less than other competing tech companies.
  - anyfactor 5y ago
    I am big on B2B businesses. I think the higher bureaucracy the better moat! But I think, IBM really tested this philosophy to its breaking point. My sentiment is that IBM Cloud should be broken down to smaller distinct ventures and hiring visionary leaders at each ventures. Like government, enterprise, Small Business+Startup+Open Source etc. They got incredibly lazy.
- jeroenhd 5y ago
  Most of these AWS alternatives seem to be based on OpenStack, and there are many hosters around the world who offer the AWS services most people use. EC2+S3+EBS+load balancing is all most businesses probably need. Add some mid-2000s style hosted databases and you're probably set up. Truthfully, most businesses don't even need all that, but modern development practices tend not to care too much about efficiency. All you really need to start competing with AWS is a data center and a shiny dashboard. They already had the data center for their own use, so extending it to provide IT services is quite a logical next step. Granted, STACKIT isn't as complete an offering like Open Telekom Cloud, but it's close enough to matter.
cphoover 5y ago
Without speaking to their likelihood of success (enough posters have already spoken on this), one thing I think is interesting is Stack-it have limited scope to compute/storage/security and network orchestration resources. It's almost like AWS before they expanded to having a mind numbing number of service offerings. Who can keep up with all these? Who, other than people training for cloud architect certifications? I worry that AWS has lost focus on its core services and instead is trying to market every shiny new thing under the sun... I work in finance, my corp is in us-east region. I think we had like 3 AWS related incidents that caused serious production outages last year... All from use of core AWS services. Now we are looking to support cross-region fault tolerance to defend against this. Supporting such a strategy sounds like it's going to be quite expensive, and technically complex.
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hkh 5y ago
Wonder how long until we get our first request to add support for this to infracost https://github.com/infracost/infracost https://github.com/infracost/infracost? At least the price list looks a lot simpler than AWS / Azure / GCP - more like UpCloud! Though honestly, if it starts to work, I'm sure the number of prices/services will grow exponentially.
ArtemZ 5y ago
½ rack (22 U) Traffic: 2TB (+€0,05 GB Extra) Term: 36 months from 299.00€/month Very impressive, yeah. 2 TB of traffic for ~22 servers for 300 EUR and they lock-in you for 36 months of contract. I think I'd better opt-out.
biztos 5y ago
"Together towards future- proof IT with STACKIT!" This is some first-class Denglish here to begin with, but because of the wrap on the hyphenation it took me a while to realize they were not suggesting we "proof IT" nor stealing the grammar from Fridays For Future. > Start your journey into digital transformation with our powerful cloud and colocation solutions. Maybe their target market is companies that are not yet using computers? Also, I love that one of their references is... Schwarz Group. And another one is owned by... wait for it... Schwarz Group. Which leaves one consulting company that I vaguely suspect might have some non-STACKIT relationship with Schwarz Group. References, check! /s
nix23 5y ago
>Electricity availability: 99.98% / month Ehh WHAT? That's not really usable.
nunez 5y ago
I think this cloud is specific to grocery and retail, which makes sense. I worked with a large medical insurance chain that attempted to do the same thing, but for other insurers.
Hardik_Shah 5y ago
While the ambitious European cloud project "Gaia X" is unlikely to produce tangible results for some time, the Schwarz Group has created an offering under the STACKIT brand that promises scalable cloud solutions from the DACH region with maximum data sovereignty. The STACKIT cloud is still in the BETA phase, but the cloud service should be available soon.
IanCal 5y ago
> At a glance > Simple pricing models > Complete cost transparency > Verbrauchsorientierte Abrechnung Followed by "from X" pricing with zero further information.
pachico 5y ago
Where are the specs? Am I the only one failing at finding them?

236 points by FlyingSnake 5y ago

I'm not familiar with large European companies, but is this kind of like Aldi offering AWS-like services? Clancy's Cloud Compute, and Casa Mamita's Message Queues?

Keyframe 5y ago
Yeah, Lidl and Kaufland.. kind of absurd, just like amazon launching computer infrastructure project.

KingOfCoders 5y ago

Some of my customers in German Healthcare startups might be interested, they get harassed all the time for using AWS.

TheNoxier 5y ago
[dead]

mkj 5y ago

"Get in touch" for signup does not seem like a rival to AWS.

junon 5y ago
Very German. Tech companies here don't like open signups. I have absolutely no idea why. Not a single SaaS startup I've worked for or have worked with here has had open signups.
- trh0awayman 5y ago
  I think that's because there is no real "open signup" for starting a company here, either. It's not like people here are legally allowed to try out a business before officially starting it - that would be highly illegal. In the US, you can spin up and spin down businesses the way you would an AWS VM. That, and Germans value contracts/stability over many other things - including the customers themselves.
  - junon 5y ago
    None of what you said about companies is true in Germany. You're able to sign up for a company Steuernummer easier than in the US, in fact.
    - trh0awayman 5y ago
      A tax ID is not a company. I've started companies in both countries - the burden and costs of starting and running one in Germany is far higher. In the US, I can start selling muffins, wooden furniture, whatever to my friends, family, and neighbors without doing anything. I can walk into a local grocery store and convince the owner to carry my products. I can test out markets and use Stripe, Paypal, Patreon: any payment service I want without doing a single thing. At most, I just have to pay my taxes at the very end of the year. I can do all that while working 1, even 2 jobs if I want. I can pick up a shift at Uber, then work on my business. You can't just start an Etsy store here. None of those things are possible here and are all underlined by ones appetite for risk. Handling VAT is a literal nightmare. Monthly invoices, dealing with the Finanzamt on a monthly basis for the first year or two. Everything comes with stipulations/exceptions and requires a careful reading of the law - which of course, is impossible for anyone to understand, so you're forced to hire a lawyer. It costs like 20 bucks to dissolve an LLC. How much does it cost to dissolve an UG? I wasn't trying to insinuate that one country is better than another. With the burdens comes stability. My company is rock solid here. There will basically never be a competitor for me, because the burden is too high for anyone to stomach.
bayindirh 5y ago
Oracle's cloud also completes registration and provision by hand. Also, not everyone gets an account. If they can get a decent traction, they can scale-up step by step. Rome didn't got built in a day.
- WatchDog 5y ago
  I’ve signed up for oracle cloud account and started using it without any hand holding.
  - bayindirh 5y ago
    My account provision took almost one day. Some friends' accounts didn't get through and got opened.
  - sergiotapia 5y ago
    Can I ask why you went with Oracle Cloud? It sounds very strange, like onboarding your employees with Blackberry phones.
    - bayindirh 5y ago
      Speedy ARM machines with plenty of resources for free. More than enough to play with hobby stuff and see where ARM is going.
      - sergiotapia 5y ago
        I see, I thought you were using it for business
        bayindirh 5y ago
        Ha, nope. We have enough servers on prem. Colocation/cloud doesn't fit for our stuff (HPC) anyway.
    - charcircuit 5y ago
FlyingSnake 5y ago
Most likely they have a different enterprise sales pipeline for their target audience, e.g. EU Businesses.
jeroenhd 5y ago
The contact form mentions that they're only looking to serve enterprise customers right now, they probably want to prevent small accounts from swamping the system while they're working on expanding their availability.

m00dy 5y ago

looks like we are witnessing the moment for the future of cloud in europe

grnmamba 5y ago
Ovh and hetzner have existed for ages. And you can actually purchase services from them.
- 0des 5y ago
  I've never had AWS out of nowhere threaten to terminate my account I've had for months unless I send them a photo of my passport and ID next to it. Looking at you Hetzner.
luciusdomitius 5y ago
No. Because: 1) AWS has very serious regulatory capture in Europe - e.g. for banking, government, possibly else it is the only one approved solution. 2) Those pension-fund owned German enterprises are legendary bad at IT. The best way you could describe the culture there is anti-agile & anti-meritocratic.

sidcool 5y ago

The title seems opinionated. Link does not have any indication of an AWS competition. The services are hardly close to what AWS offers.

pluc 5y ago
Anything that hosts anything is seen as a "competitor to AWS" since some people are able to boil down AWS to a "cloud host". Admittedly they've grown to do much much more specific things, but one could argue that's the center of their offering.
- marcosdumay 5y ago
  Anything that hosts anything competes with AWS in some way. AWS will certainly do more things than any competitor, but it doesn't mean it's not competing.
detaro 5y ago
Yes. If I remember right Schwarz Group doesn't use AWS because they don't want to give money and data to a big competitor, but that doesn't make their hosting setup an "AWS competitor". And as far as I can see the site also doesn't claim anything like that, so this is a clear case of "don't editorizalize titles!"
moonchrome 5y ago
To be honest it took some scrolling but it does seem to offer some cloud services like managed databases, elasticsearch, rabbitmq, redis, k8s - this is not just barebone VM host.
luciusdomitius 5y ago
Well you have a kubernetes cluser + various dbs and message brokers. This is what 99% of clients actually use in AWS. It makes sense that exactly this is part of the minimum viable product.
lozenge 5y ago
Nor do they appear to have actually launched.

fguerraz 5y ago

I'm surprised they didn't call it Silvercrest Web Services

mattiasberge 5y ago
Dulani Web Services
Keyframe 5y ago
Parkside services
pluc 5y ago
BWS, cause if you're going for A you better be B?
daneel_w 5y ago
Crusti Croc Colo.
scoutt 5y ago
I can guess why... Everybody would recall that cheap kitchen appliance that broke within the first month after purchase.
deleted 5y ago
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pluc 5y ago

STACKIT totally sounds like a legitimate AWS rival. It says so right in the name!

DonHopkins 5y ago
The Royal Society For Putting Things On Top of Other Things approves of STACKIT! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFrdqQZ8FFc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFrdqQZ8FFc
flipbrad 5y ago
Embarrassing "We are STACKT" typo right in the middle of the page, too.

leberle 5y ago

oO "you can launch a VM here" is not really a "rival to AWS" tbh...

eatonphil 5y ago

Is that a bigger deal than OVH or Hertzner? I'm in the US but I'm a big fan of OVH. Run all my development on a bare metal OVH server in Canada.

grnmamba 5y ago
Right now this is just a marketing page with no way to create an account.

sva_ 5y ago

Lidl, the company that wasted 500 million Euro to integrate their system with SAP, but failed?

coffeeblack 5y ago
“So now what do we do with all those programmers we hired for the ERP project?” “I have an idea…”
- toyg 5y ago
  I seriously doubt ERP programmers can or want to be repurposed to web stuff.
luciusdomitius 5y ago
To be honest, Lidl is far from the only company with a failed billion-dollar SAP implementation. In recent years this is becoming the standard.
mschuster91 5y ago
Failures and problems with SAP integration are incredibly common, I would not be placing blame so hard on LIDL themselves. The root cause is usually that SAP goes for any new product / addon to whoever they feel the market leader is in the respective area, models their processes (usually without questioning them too much) and then packages this as a new product or addon. New customers then have to either adapt their processes to the process of the "market leader" (no matter if they are fit or not for the purpose or are actually efficient) or they have to adapt the SAP workflows - and that is where it gets hairy as fuck and where the problems arise: - ABAP programmers are low in supply and high in demand (as the role requires both DBA and general coding skills as well as a ton of SAP-specific knowledge and the patience to deal with the bullshit that is the SAP UI) - add to that that most people buy SAP skills from third party consultants with all the bullshit that comes with that (inadequate oversight, juniors being sold as seniors, near- and offshoring with timezone and language differences as well as cultural differences) - the further you deviate from the SAP-prepackaged process the harder any patch or heaven forbid major update becomes. If you fuck it up badly enough you are just finished with releasing the last patch and then you already are in crunch mode again for the next patch. In my opinion and experience SAP is only relevant these days because of lock-in and "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" effect and because they are relatively quick at implementing law changes as code, not because the people who actually have to use it want to use it - quite to the contrary. And, speaking as a German, the fact that this company is just about the only major IT company that Germany has is both extremely sad and exemplary for German IT importance in general at the same time.

unfocussed_mike 5y ago

So it's a bunch of cost-effective web services, and then in the middle a lathe, a chainsaw and a heated towel rail?

fullstop 5y ago
The Aisle of Shame, at least for Aldi.
- unfocussed_mike 5y ago
  There was a 3D printer in the Aldi Aisle Of Shame at one point. Not a bad one either. Not seen a 3D printer in the "middle of Lidl" yet but I expect to.
  - fullstop 5y ago
    I have a bathroom sink faucet which came from the Aisle Of Shame. It's actually very nice!

toyg 5y ago

How would I know this is Lidl? It's not in the references, which are underwhelming. From the site, this is no different from dozens of other consultancy-oriented cloud providers.

mlatu 5y ago
it says so at the bottom of the page: "The Schwarz Group consists of the well-known brands Lidl and Kaufland, as well as Schwarz Produktion and waste and recycling management companies."
johnfarrelldev 5y ago
> The Schwarz Group covers the entire value chain of the food trade like no other trading company, from production to sales to materials management. Digitalization and its pressure to change are noticeable in all business areas. To continue to successfully serve rising customer needs, new digital business models must be iterated even faster – and this while the data and system infrastructure becomes increasingly complex. As the number 1 in the European retail business, the Schwarz Group knows that those who do not digitize will lose market share in the long term. Lidl are part of the Schwarz Group.
jacquesm 5y ago
"STACKIT is the digital brand of Schwarz IT and therefore part of the IT organisation of one of the world’s largest retail groups. The Schwarz Group consists of the well-known brands Lidl and Kaufland, as well as Schwarz Produktion and waste and recycling management companies."
mtmail 5y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwarz_Gruppe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwarz_Gruppe is the parent of Lidl. And the Schwarz IT business group runs StackIT. There is also Schwarz Mobility for fleet management of company cars. I don't think it's meant to be associated with the Lidl brand.

jacquesm 5y ago

I think they'll have a hard time finding people to staff that, Lidl has a long history of underpaying and abusing their personnel and maybe they think that if Amazon can get away with that that they qualify at some level but datacenter employees are not going to like being dealt with like that. Lidl as an employer has a trackrecord that would cause me to think twice about hosting with them, no matter what the price. That said, being part of the same 'group' there might be enough insulation to avoid this link damaging the company, but since the Lidl connection is proudly mentioned on each page in the footer. I think that they either don't realize that it might be a risk to declare that so openly or they don't care in the same way that scammers don't care about you figuring out they are scammers, if you are offended by that then they probably don't want to hire you because you just might be aware of your market value. For some more information about Lidl employer-employee relationships: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lidl#Working_conditions_and_labour_rights https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lidl#Working_conditions_and_la...

throwaway4good 5y ago
Whereas I hear the pay at the Amazon fulfillment centers is really good???!
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- lnxg33k1 5y ago
  Yeah I was also a bit confused about that, like few months ago 2 employee had to die during a storm just because Jeff Pesos couldn't afford to keep a fulfillment center closed and people still work at AWS without conscience issues?
- jacquesm 5y ago
  Yes, that must be why Amazon works hard to ensure their employees don't unionize. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/16/technology/amazon-unions-virginia.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/16/technology/amazon-unions-... Who needs collective bargaining power if the pay is so great.

jmillikin 5y ago

> STACKIT services are currently offered to the Group’s internal > customers and are continuously optimised according to their > requirements. In the future, it is also planned to offer the > services on the external market.

MrBuddyCasino 5y ago
I bet their "internal customers" is mostly their bottom of the barrel kaufland.de marketplace.
- carstenhag 5y ago
  You don't think the entire schwarz group would need databases, network stuff, VMs etc? The Kaufland marketplace for taken over from Real.

aeyes 5y ago

This product looks like it doesn't respect the license of Elastic: https://www.stackit.de/en/product/elasticsearch https://www.stackit.de/en/product/elasticsearch

bitlax 5y ago

> "rival" Sometimes people will post a React template on HN with the title "How to Build Twitter."

londons_explore 5y ago

So, when I buy a $5 bag of potatoes from lidl, how much of that money is going to pay for these servers? I would hope that for a retail business like Lidl, far less than 1% of the revenue goes into IT staffing and systems costs. I worry that the number is closer to 10%.

tssva 5y ago
Lately I would consider myself lucky to find a bag of potatoes at Lidl. In the US at least they seem to be struggling to keep shelves stocked. I have 2 Lidl locations within 15 minutes of me and for the last few months the shelves have been pretty bare at both. To fill them up they have started stocking many more name brands which are not priced competitively with other grocery stores. I understand there are currently supply issues but the Aldi across the street from one of the Lidl locations isn't having this severe of an issue. The traditional grocery store chains in the area also don't seem to be having anywhere near the same level of supply issues even for their store brands.

athenot 5y ago

Cloud Hosting, in the Center Aisle of Lidl, next to the other random items for sale. In all fairness, this move makes sense to monetize any surplus they have in DC capacity. In terms of competition, their offering competes more with Equinix and the like than with AWS.

gpjanik 5y ago

Wasn't sure if April fools or not. German companies have launched so many of those "rivals" to AWS by now, all of them require you to call someone/send a letter/FAX to create a VM. I wonder if they understand that the success of cloud, SaaS and generally majority of modern, scalable businesses comes from the fact that it _can_ be self-served.

exar0815 5y ago
Strange, I never had to send a single FAX in my life in germany. Especially not for any cloud offerings located in EU/germany. I would LOVE to see proof for that.
- vdfs 5y ago
  Some even use Telegram
- belter 5y ago
  German Newspaper (2018): "...Two-thirds of German companies regularly use faxes, whereas only half of them use video conferencing technologies, and just one-third use messaging services or online collaboration tools..." https://www.handelsblatt.com/english/companies/digitization-the-fax-is-dead-long-live-the-fax/23583118.html https://www.handelsblatt.com/english/companies/digitization-...
  - progre 5y ago
    Not proof. The question was about cloud companies.
    - belter 5y ago
      The second part of the comment yes. The first was about how pervasive the use of fax was within German business. But in Japan it's worst: "Japan’s reliance on fax machines lambasted by coronavirus doctor": https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/coronavirus-japan-fax-machine-online-hanko-a9501906.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/coronavirus-ja... "Japan Can't Get Rid of the Fax Machine With Offices Demanding It Stays": https://www.insider.com/japan-cant-get-rid-the-fax-machine-offices-demanding-stay-2021-7 https://www.insider.com/japan-cant-get-rid-the-fax-machine-o...

jtwaleson 5y ago

Cloud AND colocation? That’s not an AWS competitor, that’s a boring data center with some software on top of it.

jhgb 5y ago
I thought that AWS was "a boring data center with some software on top of it"?
- jtwaleson 5y ago
  Haha, it depends on where you put the emphasis. I would say AWS is cloud services that happen to use data centers under the hood.
  - hansel_der 5y ago
    i wonder when cloud services will have fully migrated to serverless and we can finally do away with the datacenters once and for all.

Copenjin 5y ago

Hetzner is more of a rival to AWS than this for now.

wongarsu 5y ago
And this is really more positioned as a rival to Hetzner than to AWS, for now.
- mxxc 5y ago
  the hype in terms of money they can pour here could potentially be a factor, as opposed to "feature completeness" right now.
usrusr 5y ago
..and when you are a customer there you know that you are core business and not just on some service that might be ended any day due to some strategic coin flip. I have no idea how these sidecar business ever establish themselves in terms of trust (same certainly applies to early years AWS)

rr808 5y ago

I wonder how secure AWS really is. Most people need some VPCs, some VMs, maybe k8s and a database all with global redundancy. Skills and training is almost the biggest barrier but with Terraform and/or some standardized APIs I'd think most mid level firms could switch in a month or two.

luciusdomitius 5y ago

So, that's what Schwarz IT has been so actively recruiting for. I got contacted 3+ time, however each time it was a rather low tech position, right under some technically illiterate MBA chap, so I did not even bother submitting a resume. I have serious doubt they would be able to mount a serious challenge to AWS. These German companies - DB, DHL, SAP just don't have cultures meritocratic enough to be competitive with the new boys. Not everything in the world is a post office or a rebar manufacture line.

pluc 5y ago
There's plenty of EU-based companies they need to challenge before they can challenge AWS (Hetzner, OVH, Upcloud, Raptr..) I don't see it happening, at least not with what they're showing.
carstenhag 5y ago
I was an employee of the Kaufland IT back then, which then was integrated to the Schwarz IT some years ago. Only a small team worked on StackIt back then - it probably grew the last years, but most will not work on this. I also don't think they will be a serious contendor to the current companies
ivan_gammel 5y ago
Those Schwarz digital branches have the culture and structure that is not different from Berlin startups, only a bit more mature. I think they are capable.

andrew_eit 5y ago

"You need scalable enterprise cloud solutions for digital business processes while maintaining complete data integrity?" Nitpicking here, but my god, can German companies/universities/organizations please start paying for native English speakers to do their copy-writing and STOP translating directly from German? It's "Do you need". Not "You need..." This is the typical translation of the German marketing "Du brauchst <blah>?" or "Du bist ein <blah>? Dann...". I see pattern this all the time, such as "You are a student who wants to work on innovating projects? Then apply...". This may sound like a rant, but I genuinely think these little details would go a long way to actually showing that the German economy does have some sort of international mindset. This persistence in sticking to these wrong ways just makes me think that 'OK this is another conservative old-school minded German company trying to play unicorn'. If there's no attention to detail or care for the little things on your front-page marketing website - your first contact with your customer - it just leaves me with a bad feeling about the parts I don't see. I don't know why it frustrates me enough to write a comment in the middle of the day, I guess I really can't understand how global German corporations still, as a rule all make this same error, which I suspect is just the tip of the iceberg of a larger symptom of not wanting to think outside/beyond the DACH bubble. And I feel a sense of sadness that such a country with great prospects just drags its feet lazily into the the future. Edit: I also see this all the time in Email correspondence, you can immediately tell if a person is a native German speaker because they don't capitalize the first letter in an English email after "Dear X, we are writing <blah>" (which would be 100% correct in German, but somehow no one teaches this in English classes in Germany that in English it is capitalized). For a country that loves rules, this drives me mad. Edit2: This is definitely a rant and it triggered me emotionally for some odd reason. I concede that my interpretation is quite exaggerated, so please do excuse me! I'll leave the comment however because I'm curious to know whether any others feel the same way. Edit3: I will also say that translating between German and English is hard as there are some fundamental differences in their structure. There are very colloquial ways to say or not say certain things. That is why native speakers are essential for such things. Edit4: Please take this comment with a pinch of salt. This is the rant of an fatigued expat who decided to blow some off steam about the oddities of their host country that drive them bananas. For posterity, I will say there at least 10 amazing wonderful things about German culture that I love, for each odd cultural thing. But you know, at some point when you see something for the umpteenth time, something snaps inside of you and it all comes out, especially on a mid-week day like a Wednesday.

k__ 5y ago

I will wait for the Aldi offering.

KingOfCoders 5y ago

2 questions: Cheaper than AWS? Managed Postgres? [Edit] Looks like yes to both.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

jillesvangurp 5y ago

If you discount the title, which is a bit click-baity and not actually featured on the website, this makes a bit more sense. This is one of several companies in Germany reluctant to host with the existing US based cloud providers. So, they decided to use off the shelf software (openstack probably) and stick it on computers in data centers that they own. That's of course not an alternative to AWS other than that it is a self-hosted cloud and as such an alternative to not self-hosting it. Nothing wrong with self hosting stuff. Lots of companies do that for all sorts of reasons. White labeling it and selling your self hosted cloud to others is also not that uncommon. There's an enormous long tail of data centers that do exactly that. Lidl is big enough that they probably could justify spending a little extra on hardware and doing a little side business with like minded German companies. It's a weird side effect of a lot of relatively large companies in Germany that are effectively family owned businesses that just became very large over time that don't like the idea of not being in control of their own assets and infrastructure. They are old fashioned, don't like change, and not very flexible. The added dimension here in Germany is that a lot of these companies have yet to modernize their IT and are relatively clueless on that front. Lidl would be a good example of such a company. And not for a lack of trying. They are the same company that botched their deal with SAP after spending half a billion on them by insisting on so many customizations that the project just never shipped and they pulled the plug. They want custom everything and they ask for stuff they think they need without understanding their own needs. It's a combination of stubbornness, arrogance and corporate stupidity. That same reflex is driving them to do this. They could probably have saved quite a bit of money by just using existing cloud services. I actually have to deal with this sentiment as we are based in Germany with our company. A lot of Germans are mildly psychotic/irrational about things in the cloud. I've met Germans that insist that financial service can't be hosted in AWS. Horse shit of course, many banks in Germany do exactly that and Amazon has a nice data center in Frankfurt for that. It's one of their main sites in Europe as it is a big market and they'll comply with whatever to keep that business going. Google Cloud is currently what we host on because it is good, cheap, and easy to use. But we have customers that don't like that at all and we are looking into dedicated setups for these customers on various German providers. They'll get the same stuff at a great premium that we will charge them for without any shame. These services are typically more expensive, harder to use, less reliable, and more poorly supported. There is no upside other than the "hosted in Germany" thing. Pay more for way less. Their choice but a huge PITA for our operations.

jpomykala 5y ago

Electricity availability: 99.98% / month

_druu 5y ago

> STACKIT is the digital brand of Schwarz IT ... Having worked with them, I can assure you, it's gonna be a disaster. I've been called into a project as a consultant, and it took them over 3 months to even get any credentials for VPN, let alone repositories. I just can't see this working out in any shape or form.

jpomykala 5y ago
I also worked with people from Schwarz and some smaller company who manages some business data. It's going to be a disaster. I'm not even surprised that you need to 'Get in touch'. They do pretty many things manually and simply wrong. Client is processing large Excel file for 4 days? Somebody simply kills the job and the whole process starts again. Big words, cheap execution.
mxxc 5y ago
i mean right now one can't even sign up properly. but obviously since they want to compete on a platform level as opposed to whatever you were doing for them, surely "not being able to create an account" isn't gonna draw users away from gcp/aws.
mkdirp 5y ago
> it took them over 3 months to even get any credentials for VPN, let alone repositories. What you're saying is, you can just join, get paid, and do nothing? Where do I sign up?
- _druu 5y ago
  That worked for 2 weeks... Then they didn't want to pay any more for me waiting. So really not worth it

mwexler 5y ago

I have this vision that all the products will be "similar" but just different enough from the originals to avoid a lawsuit, just like the stores. So, Radshift, S2+1 storage, Appflower, DynomiteDB, etc.

nik736 5y ago

As far as I can see they don't even operate their own network and according to RIPE they don't own any IPs. How is this supposed to work?

FlyingSnake 5y ago

This was discussed 2 years ago on HN and had some interesting comments and insights from insiders¹ [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23151069 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23151069

Garlef 5y ago

Not a single mention of infrastructure as code or serverless ... :shrug:

anyfactor 5y ago

The only companies that have justifiable merit of saying they have launched a rival to AWS are either government backed entities, Snowflake or IBM and/or a joint venture of server manufacturers. I have no clue why IBM cloud has such a poor market position considering how dominant of a business it was. But there is still hope. A combined forces attempt could be a viable strategy. Snowflake has changed cloud service providers several times to my knowledge. In my opinion their offering and business philosophy is unique to allow themselves to venture into this business. For government backed cloud you have Alibaba cloud as an example. Regional cloud service peovider with government funding or active monitoring is an evetuality in my opinion. The Ukraine situation proves my point. Keep an eye out on India for this. I feel like the govt is gonna give it a shot before 2030. The reason behind this deserves its own article.

ShroudedNight 5y ago
I don't know what the status is now, but back when I was working for IBM, their Bluemix offering demonstrated a complete lack of commitment to operational excellence with seemingly routine downtime, with an undercurrent of "It's 1700, time to sod off for the day" regardless of the state of their service. It also didn't help that they seemed intent on paying 35+% less than other competing tech companies.
- anyfactor 5y ago
  I am big on B2B businesses. I think the higher bureaucracy the better moat! But I think, IBM really tested this philosophy to its breaking point. My sentiment is that IBM Cloud should be broken down to smaller distinct ventures and hiring visionary leaders at each ventures. Like government, enterprise, Small Business+Startup+Open Source etc. They got incredibly lazy.
jeroenhd 5y ago
Most of these AWS alternatives seem to be based on OpenStack, and there are many hosters around the world who offer the AWS services most people use. EC2+S3+EBS+load balancing is all most businesses probably need. Add some mid-2000s style hosted databases and you're probably set up. Truthfully, most businesses don't even need all that, but modern development practices tend not to care too much about efficiency. All you really need to start competing with AWS is a data center and a shiny dashboard. They already had the data center for their own use, so extending it to provide IT services is quite a logical next step. Granted, STACKIT isn't as complete an offering like Open Telekom Cloud, but it's close enough to matter.

cphoover 5y ago

Without speaking to their likelihood of success (enough posters have already spoken on this), one thing I think is interesting is Stack-it have limited scope to compute/storage/security and network orchestration resources. It's almost like AWS before they expanded to having a mind numbing number of service offerings. Who can keep up with all these? Who, other than people training for cloud architect certifications? I worry that AWS has lost focus on its core services and instead is trying to market every shiny new thing under the sun... I work in finance, my corp is in us-east region. I think we had like 3 AWS related incidents that caused serious production outages last year... All from use of core AWS services. Now we are looking to support cross-region fault tolerance to defend against this. Supporting such a strategy sounds like it's going to be quite expensive, and technically complex.

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hkh 5y ago

Wonder how long until we get our first request to add support for this to infracost https://github.com/infracost/infracost https://github.com/infracost/infracost? At least the price list looks a lot simpler than AWS / Azure / GCP - more like UpCloud! Though honestly, if it starts to work, I'm sure the number of prices/services will grow exponentially.

ArtemZ 5y ago

½ rack (22 U) Traffic: 2TB (+€0,05 GB Extra) Term: 36 months from 299.00€/month Very impressive, yeah. 2 TB of traffic for ~22 servers for 300 EUR and they lock-in you for 36 months of contract. I think I'd better opt-out.

biztos 5y ago

"Together towards future- proof IT with STACKIT!" This is some first-class Denglish here to begin with, but because of the wrap on the hyphenation it took me a while to realize they were not suggesting we "proof IT" nor stealing the grammar from Fridays For Future. > Start your journey into digital transformation with our powerful cloud and colocation solutions. Maybe their target market is companies that are not yet using computers? Also, I love that one of their references is... Schwarz Group. And another one is owned by... wait for it... Schwarz Group. Which leaves one consulting company that I vaguely suspect might have some non-STACKIT relationship with Schwarz Group. References, check! /s

nix23 5y ago

>Electricity availability: 99.98% / month Ehh WHAT? That's not really usable.

nunez 5y ago

I think this cloud is specific to grocery and retail, which makes sense. I worked with a large medical insurance chain that attempted to do the same thing, but for other insurers.

Hardik_Shah 5y ago

While the ambitious European cloud project "Gaia X" is unlikely to produce tangible results for some time, the Schwarz Group has created an offering under the STACKIT brand that promises scalable cloud solutions from the DACH region with maximum data sovereignty. The STACKIT cloud is still in the BETA phase, but the cloud service should be available soon.

IanCal 5y ago

> At a glance > Simple pricing models > Complete cost transparency > Verbrauchsorientierte Abrechnung Followed by "from X" pricing with zero further information.

pachico 5y ago

Where are the specs? Am I the only one failing at finding them?