5 ms·

As long as I can't provision these service myself without having to "call for advice" I am not using it irregardless of the price. It's 2022 and any company sti

As long as I can't provision these service myself without having to "call for advice" I am not using it irregardless of the price. It's 2022 and any company still hiding behind "call for pricing" or "call for quote" that isn't servicing government agencies is going to be eaten alive by any other provider not making customer run thought hoops. They claim they are the German AWS when they miss the first thing that Bezos did at Amazon. He removed the barrier of entry to the max. He realized that people do impulse buying and the easier it is to do this the more business you get. Does anyone remember 1-click? I am sure a I have quit out of a purchase a hundred or more times at random vendors when I ended up having to create an account to just find out how much shipping is. I had to order some custom laser cut metal parts. There are hundreds of companies offering this in Switzerland but almost all require a call for quote. The one company that let me upload my Fusion 360 file and give me an instant quote is the one I went with even if it cost more because I don't have the time to write 10 companies and send each one of them a CAD file having to explain what I want for such a limited run.

asvitkine 4y ago
Unless EU governments pass protectionist laws requiring the use of local services.
- radicalbyte 4y ago
  It's literally only a problem because the US laws allow the US government to force MS / Google / Amazon to hand over all data stored by German companies on data residing in German datacenters located inside Germany, if an American company is running them. That bullshit caused us a huge amount of headaches when we wanted to deploy our COVID systems to Azure...
  - holografix 4y ago
    CMEK was introduced for this. NSA can have the data but won’t ever read it
    - oblio 4y ago
      It's still not the same thing as not having that data, at all. Once you have the encrypted data somewhere, and if you really need to, it's just a game of time. At some point the old encryption will be broken.
    - radicalbyte 4y ago
      It doesn't matter, according to the GDPR encrypted (or hashed) personal information is personal information.
- emj 4y ago
  When we are talking about cloud and digital services there is nothing protectionist about it. The amount of powers all countries spy agencies have over cloud platforms is scary.
helldritch 4y ago
Wow, I thought you were joking, but you really weren't. From the homepage it took me 7 clicks to drill-down into information about a specific compute service and see pricing, and it leads to their generic contact form page: https://www.stackit.de/en/contact https://www.stackit.de/en/contact They're really missing that these big digital movements / transformations typically start out as a single person investigating / fiddling around with the service on some trial account or with a $10 provisioning spend as part of a few hours long Jira ticket on a Friday afternoon. By inserting humans in the middle of this process (and the delay and back-and-forth which is incurred from having to formally give all that company information and implementation planning information and have it vetted) they're going to turn off a really significant number of potentially lucrative clients who will go elsewhere because they don't have to mess around with humans until they're sure of what they want.
- rmoriz 4y ago
  I guess Lidl targets German Mittelstand and DAX40 companies that already have outsourced to other cloud vendors or are in trouble with their legacy infrastructure. How many of the startups you have in mind didn't switch their infra once they grew? I know not a single one.
  - oblio 4y ago
    Yeah, but the thing is, why would they switch away from AWS/Azure/... unless forced to by regulation? Existing cloud providers can scale to planet sized businesses.
    - yayachiken 4y ago
      The press releases by the Schwarz Group never even mention AWS, only indirectly by pointing out "digital sovereignty" when using a Germany-based company instead of a "foreign cloud hoster". Calling Stackit an "AWS competitor" is most likely just editorialization by the 3rd party media. The target customer are companies which are just barely moving away from self-hosted hardware.
    - 4y ago
rmoriz 4y ago
I think it's appropriate to start with a set of limited customers and intensive communication to expand and stabilize the offering. Amazon and others usually limit new features to specific customers, too. Once it's stable and working, they make it available to more customers. Let's see what happens in 6-12 months.
jotm 4y ago
Phone call culture is real in Germany lol. It's pretty maddening sometimes, I'd write emails that include everything they might need to know, yet they insist on calling back just to read the emails and confirm every point. Like... why?
- bkircher 4y ago
  Like the (sadly) usual "Hey, just calling you up to let you know that I just send you an email! Have you read it yet? What do you think?"
arinlen 4y ago
> It's 2022 and any company still hiding behind "call for pricing" or "call for quote" that isn't servicing government agencies is going to be eaten alive by any other provider not making customer run thought hoops. For contrast, service providers like Hetzner (also a German company) let you provision cloud instances with a single click, and you can SSH into them immediately. I have a few pet projects running as docker swarm stacks in Hetzner nodes, and the time it takes between provisioning instances from scratch and get everything installed, configured, up and running and serving production traffic with an Ansible playbook is measured in seconds. In StackIT it takes longer to get your phonecall picked up by someone. Nevertheless, this is an excellent step in the right direction. If the cloud is renting other people's computers, it makes no sense at all that there are so few people renting their own hardware (specially within the EU), and the ones that do charge a hefty premium.
junon 4y ago
German companies are opponents of the self-service models, almost as a rule. Never ceases to amaze me.
chrisseaton 4y ago
> As long as I can't provision these service myself without having to "call for advice" I am not using it irregardless of the price. Wouldn't be surprised if you have to fax in a request for a new instance.
Aperocky 4y ago
Is it even a cloud without publicly accessible API? instead of `aws ec2 run-instances` and 1000 other APIs that AWS expose, it looks like lidl just have `lidl contact-sales`
yayachiken 4y ago
I am going to start working for one of those German cloud providers (not Schwarz Group) next month. As far as I understand so far, the barrier-to-entry is actually a feature. Those providers usually strictly target the B2B sector, with a focus on small to medium companies which only now start to do "digitalization". They usually still run with old-fashioned IT departments and certainly no budget to hire a full DevOps department with experienced senior developers. For that reason, the German providers usually don't focus on scale and automation as the support burden is rather high. Hosting in Germany, and being compliant by default with many data protection rules is a big plus for inexperienced customers. But I imagine, this also leads to high customer retention due to de-facto lock-in. Note that the article says that they are using a "proprietary" cloud platform. In my experience, in Germany "Cloud" is still a very ill-defined marketing term. It might well be possible that the "Cloud" just means that you can use a WYSIWYG interface to provision Linux VM templates (see for example the IONOS "Data Center Designer"). I had to look at the "Stackit" homepage itself to confirm that they are indeed hosting a Kubernetes based PaaS. But they indeed seem to focus on dynamic VM-Hosting and even colocation. They even mention SAP hosting! In the past, United Internet, Deutsche Telekom and some others had a hosted e-mail offering branded as "Internet made in Germany" for similar reasons. Another company of the "Internet made in Germany" group is Strato. They started with website and shop builders, and now make a lot of money essentially offering hosted Owncloud/Seafile services. Usually those are also marketed as a "Cloud" offering.
- ChuckNorris89 4y ago
  >"Internet made in Germany" This makes me shudder just thinking about this, knowing how bad internet in Germany is, falling behind countries like Romania and Ukraine by several leagues.
  - flemhans 4y ago
    Yes! Back in 2010 when I used to live in Berlin we found it almost fun and cute how there was bad internet, poor mobile coverage, and no credit cards accepted. It was fun to return in 2020 and experience the exact same thing again
sideshowb 4y ago
The weird thing afaiac is that lidl is about the least online supermarket there is, at least here in the uk. No home delivery, no online catalogue, one time I had to order a replacement battery for one of their drills and was directed to a different company entirely. Aws was spun out from a successful large scale online retailer. What are lidl thinking?
- Frost1x 4y ago
  >The weird thing afaiac is that lidl is about the least online supermarkets there is, at least here in the uk. No home delivery, no online catalogue ... In the US they have an online catalog and even in/out of stock indicators for your store. Lidl is now my preferred grocer outside for standard items while I use higher end grocers primary for their meat departments that have better cuts of meat available. Their produce is great although if you need a speciality item you likely won't find it. Their bakery is top notch compared to most US store bakeries. They've always offered household items but I've noticed this expanding at my local store beyond toiletries and disposables, things like clothes and what not. I can't say I ever considered buying power tools or anything I'd want to keep and use long term there (I tend not to go discount for such items and opt for higher quality). There are places like Home Depot close and accessible enough here in the US that I doubt most would buy such products there. They do offer some plants on the cheap, although I'm not a plant person.
  - sideshowb 4y ago
    Well that does explain it, while begging more questions! Ta
jung_j 4y ago
I get to the following PDF: https://www.stackit.de/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/220601_STACKIT_Preisliste_EN_Version-1.0.2_A4.pdf?x22668 https://www.stackit.de/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/220601_STA... It's linked from here: https://www.stackit.de/en/prices https://www.stackit.de/en/prices
tyingq 4y ago
The navigation is maybe confusing, but there is a pdf with full pricing: https://www.stackit.de/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/220601_STACKIT_Preisliste_EN_Version-1.0.2_A4.pdf https://www.stackit.de/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/220601_STA... I got to it via top menu -> prices -> scroll down a fair amount -> "to the price list" (in a yellow box)
rndgermandude 4y ago
This service isn't for you. At least not for now. This service right now is for already big companies, probably non-IT ones, looking to outsource their datacenter needs, in a GDPR compliant manner, and looking to do more "digital" in the future. These kinds of players do not look for one-click solutions, they are looking for actual people to discuss their individual requirements. Maybe latter on this thing will do AWS-style provisioning and services, but right now that doesn't even seem to be a current goal. >They claim they are the German AWS I see some media claim their are that, but it doesn't look like they themselves make that claim.
- kensai 4y ago
  This was the only post I read so far with a non sensationalized approach to the matter.
spaniard89277 4y ago
Yeah, the audacity of offering this and calling it "AWS Rival". Yeah buddy.
bowsamic 4y ago
This is how Germans operate. Everything is done by calling and on paper. It won't change
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
est31 4y ago
> As long as I can't provision these service myself without having to "call for advice" I am not using it irregardless of the price. It's 2022 and any company still hiding behind "call for pricing" or "call for quote" that isn't servicing government agencies is going to be eaten alive by any other provider not making customer run thought hoops. In order to access the really competitive pricing (to running the cloud yourself) on AWS, you have to do the same. As in, many of the bigger AWS users have deals with Amazon to get sometimes massive reductions in price, but they are custom negotiated between humans, not something you'd find on a website. The smaller AWS customers, those using the public prices, pay way more than what the service is worth.
- scarab92 4y ago
  Its offerings arent as broad as AWS, but Hetzner cloud is frictionless, fast to deploy and very low cost. We use it a lot for compute intensive jobs.

asvitkine 4y ago

Unless EU governments pass protectionist laws requiring the use of local services.

radicalbyte 4y ago
It's literally only a problem because the US laws allow the US government to force MS / Google / Amazon to hand over all data stored by German companies on data residing in German datacenters located inside Germany, if an American company is running them. That bullshit caused us a huge amount of headaches when we wanted to deploy our COVID systems to Azure...
- holografix 4y ago
  CMEK was introduced for this. NSA can have the data but won’t ever read it
  - oblio 4y ago
    It's still not the same thing as not having that data, at all. Once you have the encrypted data somewhere, and if you really need to, it's just a game of time. At some point the old encryption will be broken.
  - radicalbyte 4y ago
    It doesn't matter, according to the GDPR encrypted (or hashed) personal information is personal information.
emj 4y ago
When we are talking about cloud and digital services there is nothing protectionist about it. The amount of powers all countries spy agencies have over cloud platforms is scary.

helldritch 4y ago

Wow, I thought you were joking, but you really weren't. From the homepage it took me 7 clicks to drill-down into information about a specific compute service and see pricing, and it leads to their generic contact form page: https://www.stackit.de/en/contact https://www.stackit.de/en/contact They're really missing that these big digital movements / transformations typically start out as a single person investigating / fiddling around with the service on some trial account or with a $10 provisioning spend as part of a few hours long Jira ticket on a Friday afternoon. By inserting humans in the middle of this process (and the delay and back-and-forth which is incurred from having to formally give all that company information and implementation planning information and have it vetted) they're going to turn off a really significant number of potentially lucrative clients who will go elsewhere because they don't have to mess around with humans until they're sure of what they want.

rmoriz 4y ago
I guess Lidl targets German Mittelstand and DAX40 companies that already have outsourced to other cloud vendors or are in trouble with their legacy infrastructure. How many of the startups you have in mind didn't switch their infra once they grew? I know not a single one.
- oblio 4y ago
  Yeah, but the thing is, why would they switch away from AWS/Azure/... unless forced to by regulation? Existing cloud providers can scale to planet sized businesses.
  - yayachiken 4y ago
    The press releases by the Schwarz Group never even mention AWS, only indirectly by pointing out "digital sovereignty" when using a Germany-based company instead of a "foreign cloud hoster". Calling Stackit an "AWS competitor" is most likely just editorialization by the 3rd party media. The target customer are companies which are just barely moving away from self-hosted hardware.
  - 4y ago

rmoriz 4y ago

I think it's appropriate to start with a set of limited customers and intensive communication to expand and stabilize the offering. Amazon and others usually limit new features to specific customers, too. Once it's stable and working, they make it available to more customers. Let's see what happens in 6-12 months.

jotm 4y ago

Phone call culture is real in Germany lol. It's pretty maddening sometimes, I'd write emails that include everything they might need to know, yet they insist on calling back just to read the emails and confirm every point. Like... why?

bkircher 4y ago
Like the (sadly) usual "Hey, just calling you up to let you know that I just send you an email! Have you read it yet? What do you think?"

arinlen 4y ago

> It's 2022 and any company still hiding behind "call for pricing" or "call for quote" that isn't servicing government agencies is going to be eaten alive by any other provider not making customer run thought hoops. For contrast, service providers like Hetzner (also a German company) let you provision cloud instances with a single click, and you can SSH into them immediately. I have a few pet projects running as docker swarm stacks in Hetzner nodes, and the time it takes between provisioning instances from scratch and get everything installed, configured, up and running and serving production traffic with an Ansible playbook is measured in seconds. In StackIT it takes longer to get your phonecall picked up by someone. Nevertheless, this is an excellent step in the right direction. If the cloud is renting other people's computers, it makes no sense at all that there are so few people renting their own hardware (specially within the EU), and the ones that do charge a hefty premium.

junon 4y ago

German companies are opponents of the self-service models, almost as a rule. Never ceases to amaze me.

chrisseaton 4y ago

> As long as I can't provision these service myself without having to "call for advice" I am not using it irregardless of the price. Wouldn't be surprised if you have to fax in a request for a new instance.

Aperocky 4y ago

Is it even a cloud without publicly accessible API? instead of `aws ec2 run-instances` and 1000 other APIs that AWS expose, it looks like lidl just have `lidl contact-sales`

yayachiken 4y ago

I am going to start working for one of those German cloud providers (not Schwarz Group) next month. As far as I understand so far, the barrier-to-entry is actually a feature. Those providers usually strictly target the B2B sector, with a focus on small to medium companies which only now start to do "digitalization". They usually still run with old-fashioned IT departments and certainly no budget to hire a full DevOps department with experienced senior developers. For that reason, the German providers usually don't focus on scale and automation as the support burden is rather high. Hosting in Germany, and being compliant by default with many data protection rules is a big plus for inexperienced customers. But I imagine, this also leads to high customer retention due to de-facto lock-in. Note that the article says that they are using a "proprietary" cloud platform. In my experience, in Germany "Cloud" is still a very ill-defined marketing term. It might well be possible that the "Cloud" just means that you can use a WYSIWYG interface to provision Linux VM templates (see for example the IONOS "Data Center Designer"). I had to look at the "Stackit" homepage itself to confirm that they are indeed hosting a Kubernetes based PaaS. But they indeed seem to focus on dynamic VM-Hosting and even colocation. They even mention SAP hosting! In the past, United Internet, Deutsche Telekom and some others had a hosted e-mail offering branded as "Internet made in Germany" for similar reasons. Another company of the "Internet made in Germany" group is Strato. They started with website and shop builders, and now make a lot of money essentially offering hosted Owncloud/Seafile services. Usually those are also marketed as a "Cloud" offering.

ChuckNorris89 4y ago
>"Internet made in Germany" This makes me shudder just thinking about this, knowing how bad internet in Germany is, falling behind countries like Romania and Ukraine by several leagues.
- flemhans 4y ago
  Yes! Back in 2010 when I used to live in Berlin we found it almost fun and cute how there was bad internet, poor mobile coverage, and no credit cards accepted. It was fun to return in 2020 and experience the exact same thing again

sideshowb 4y ago

The weird thing afaiac is that lidl is about the least online supermarket there is, at least here in the uk. No home delivery, no online catalogue, one time I had to order a replacement battery for one of their drills and was directed to a different company entirely. Aws was spun out from a successful large scale online retailer. What are lidl thinking?

Frost1x 4y ago
>The weird thing afaiac is that lidl is about the least online supermarkets there is, at least here in the uk. No home delivery, no online catalogue ... In the US they have an online catalog and even in/out of stock indicators for your store. Lidl is now my preferred grocer outside for standard items while I use higher end grocers primary for their meat departments that have better cuts of meat available. Their produce is great although if you need a speciality item you likely won't find it. Their bakery is top notch compared to most US store bakeries. They've always offered household items but I've noticed this expanding at my local store beyond toiletries and disposables, things like clothes and what not. I can't say I ever considered buying power tools or anything I'd want to keep and use long term there (I tend not to go discount for such items and opt for higher quality). There are places like Home Depot close and accessible enough here in the US that I doubt most would buy such products there. They do offer some plants on the cheap, although I'm not a plant person.
- sideshowb 4y ago
  Well that does explain it, while begging more questions! Ta

jung_j 4y ago

I get to the following PDF: https://www.stackit.de/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/220601_STACKIT_Preisliste_EN_Version-1.0.2_A4.pdf?x22668 https://www.stackit.de/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/220601_STA... It's linked from here: https://www.stackit.de/en/prices https://www.stackit.de/en/prices

tyingq 4y ago

The navigation is maybe confusing, but there is a pdf with full pricing: https://www.stackit.de/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/220601_STACKIT_Preisliste_EN_Version-1.0.2_A4.pdf https://www.stackit.de/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/220601_STA... I got to it via top menu -> prices -> scroll down a fair amount -> "to the price list" (in a yellow box)

rndgermandude 4y ago

This service isn't for you. At least not for now. This service right now is for already big companies, probably non-IT ones, looking to outsource their datacenter needs, in a GDPR compliant manner, and looking to do more "digital" in the future. These kinds of players do not look for one-click solutions, they are looking for actual people to discuss their individual requirements. Maybe latter on this thing will do AWS-style provisioning and services, but right now that doesn't even seem to be a current goal. >They claim they are the German AWS I see some media claim their are that, but it doesn't look like they themselves make that claim.

kensai 4y ago
This was the only post I read so far with a non sensationalized approach to the matter.

spaniard89277 4y ago

Yeah, the audacity of offering this and calling it "AWS Rival". Yeah buddy.

bowsamic 4y ago

This is how Germans operate. Everything is done by calling and on paper. It won't change

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

est31 4y ago

> As long as I can't provision these service myself without having to "call for advice" I am not using it irregardless of the price. It's 2022 and any company still hiding behind "call for pricing" or "call for quote" that isn't servicing government agencies is going to be eaten alive by any other provider not making customer run thought hoops. In order to access the really competitive pricing (to running the cloud yourself) on AWS, you have to do the same. As in, many of the bigger AWS users have deals with Amazon to get sometimes massive reductions in price, but they are custom negotiated between humans, not something you'd find on a website. The smaller AWS customers, those using the public prices, pay way more than what the service is worth.

scarab92 4y ago
Its offerings arent as broad as AWS, but Hetzner cloud is frictionless, fast to deploy and very low cost. We use it a lot for compute intensive jobs.