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 i

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.