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Lidl's Cloud Gambit: Europe's Shift to Sovereign Computing
- outside1234 2y agoThis is not about privacy or sovereign clouds because at least AWS and Azure have those already in Europe. It’s about protectionism and tweaking the law to favor local companies.
- maeil 2y agoAWS and Azure's "sovereign clouds" still effectively fall under the CLOUD Act and FISA, rendering them as sovereign as the Democratic People's Republic of Korea is democratic.
- waihtis 2y agoHow so - Lidl created something for their own demand, and started selling it to externals and found demand. Nothing protectionist in that
- mantas 2y agoThere are some protectionist-like tendencies in europe and that’s fine. Both laws trying to push for as much local parts as possible and buying agencies preference for local providers by tweaking purchasing terms here and there.
- znpy 2y agoThey’re not protectionist, they’re about self-sufficiency and about lowering dependency on third parties, and it’s a good thing in my opinion.
- mantas 2y agoProtectionism and self-sufficiency is the same thing. And so agree it’s a good thing.
- waihtis 2y ago> Protectionism and self-sufficiency is the same thing please revisit the dictionary
- mantas 2y agoThere’s no local industry to protect if you ain’t self-sufficiency. And it’s damn hard to protect self-sufficiency long term without protectionism if possible at all.
- waihtis 2y agoprotectionism is an optional downstream branch of self-sufficiency - being self-sufficient does not automatically imply that it will devolve into protectionism
- mantas 2y agoBut without protectionism self-sufficiency is very likely to fall apart. Be it Chinese manufacturing or EU agriculture.
- mvanbaak 2y agothis is also how AWS started. amazon created a setup they needed and found out that they can sell it to others as well.
- mantas 2y agoYes. And it works when implemented correctly. See China.
- NeuroCoder 2y agoI'm going to apologize for my ignorance upfront here, but I was under the impression that China isn't protecting local companies. It is making the companies it can directly control the only available option. Perhaps you're referring to something other than just controlling technology and information. I'd be interested in knowing more if there's something specific you had in mind
- mantas 2y agoMany Chinese local companies took advantage of west technology they acquired in joint companies and Chinese government kicked off western companies. Preventing a good part of western big tech from entering the market was protectionism too.
- topkai22 2y agoIt’s more of a prisoners dilemma than “it works when implemented correctly.” In general, all parties do better in freer markets and all parties do poorly in restricted markets. However, when one party in a trading system implements restrictions and the others don’t that party can gain outsized benefits versus others. The world spent almost 50 years liberalizing trade systems, mostly with benefits at the national scale. It took 10-15 years for most of leaders to realize that China was successfully subverting the liberal system. “it works when implemented correctly” is the wrong lessons and will lead us to widespread protectionism and make us all poorer. The right lesson is that “bad actors need to be dealt with and excluded from the system.”
- mantas 2y ago„It works when implemented correctly“ might not be the lesson you want others to learn. But looking at China, boy did it work for them. Once you start dealing with bad actors, you'd have to kick out pretty much anybody. Did western europe played fairly with post-cold-war eastern europe? No. I hear South america have issues with US too. In reality this works great for established powers to keep status quo. For the rest... It depends on how many rules you're willing to bend. Or how others go above-and-beyond to help you out for some reason that is not part of the system.
- KingOfCoders 2y agoNot with direct control from the US - with AWS there is no privacy or sovereignity difference between EU-CENTRAL-1 or US-EAST-1 - you might tick a compliancy checkbox though. But sooner or later there will be more pressure and AWS and Azure will create legally independent companies in the EU to manage clouds in the EU.
- whizzter 2y agoSadly iirc the US laws that makes GDPR compliance problematic cover subsidiaries so making them independant enough is probably more or less impossible in practice.
- skrebbel 2y agoIf AWS gets a letter from an American 3-letter agency to plz turn over this and that data and don't tell anyone, they're going to comply, no matter what kind of paper "privacy shield" agreement the politicians negotiated this time around.
- znpy 2y agoYou can name the NSA, it’s not illegal to do it (not in Europe at least —- pun intended)
- skrebbel 2y agoI didn't mean to be vague, I meant to be general. I don't know which other agencies have this kind of unchecked power.
- __MatrixMan__ 2y agoProbably a few we've never heard of.
- vanviegen 2y agoSome might even have a different number of letters in their acronyms, to fly below our radars. :-)
- zo1 2y agoTo be a bit facetious/snarky: And we compare this to the EU's version where they're outright open about it and censor-away? "We're not being bad, this is legal censorship!"
- skrebbel 2y agoI'm not talking about censorship but about access to private data.
- spinningslate 2y agoor: the EU is serious about citizen privacy and addressing the flagrant disregard for it that the major adtech players have shown. If LIDL can compete on price/features/performance _and_ comply with the laws, then good luck to them. Equally, if the big US companies comply, then there's nothing excluding them from the market. They're already present as you note.
- yorwba 2y agoAWS does not yet have a sovereign cloud in Europe, they're planning to launch in 2025: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/aws-plans-to-invest-e7-8b-into-the-aws-european-sovereign-cloud-set-to-launch-by-the-end-of-2025/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/aws-plans-to-invest-e7... (linked in the article)
- cbsmith 2y agoIt's both. Privacy and sovereignty are big issues in Europe, specifically because of the jurisdiction issues. The fact that it provides some protection for European businesses means they'll lean into it all the more. That said, I think the Europeans would be joyous if the rest of the world would eliminate their protectionist boundaries by adopting Europe's privacy laws.
- ahartmetz 2y agoAll countries do that where strategically sensible - or beneficial to "friends" of the government. 300% import tax on Bombardier CSeries anyone? CHIPS act? Silicon Valley getting started with military contracts?
- ck45 2y agoUnrelated except it's the same company, reminded me of the failed SAP migration, https://www.retaildetail.eu/news/food/lidls-failed-it-project-cost-half-billion/ https://www.retaildetail.eu/news/food/lidls-failed-it-projec...
- KingOfCoders 2y agoAnyone with experience?
- christkv 2y agoLooking forward to cloud week at my local Lidl store.
- spinningslate 2y agowhat's in the "middle of lidl" this week? Drill bits, car shampoo and a kubernetes cluster. Nice.
- Ekaros 2y agoSeems like "beauty" health products and bedroom stuff this week. Monday well drill bits and tools... Which reminds me that I need to pick up some cheap pliers...
- christkv 2y agoKitchen and Garden stuff over here.
- Ekaros 2y agoSomeday it might be interesting to see article or video on just how Lidl's logistics and supply chain works on these special products. There is the staples, but how these shorter run campaigns are rotated around.
- mimischi 2y agoWould be curious to know if there’s an overlap with other retailers. Many “discount” supermarkets in Germany (Aldi, Penny, Lidl, Netto) have such aisles. As far as I can see in the UK, both Aldi and Lidl have similar things here, but not that vast of a variety?
- bengale 2y agoI'll trust them with my cloud infra when they can keep the high protein yoghurt in stock consistently.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- AlexanderDhoore 2y agoBeing a European, I’d love to try this. Many businesses operate completely local. I think there is a market for a Europe-only cloud provider. How do I try this? Do they have a free tier?
- liotier 2y agoHetzner and OVH are top of mind, Gandi is nice too. Not Amazon-scale, by far, but European companies hosting in Europe with decent service.
- JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B 2y agoOVH is a joke (their data center burned because they had wooden roofs), Gandi is no more, and Scaleway gave up. There is no French host anymore. Only Hetzner is left in this business.
- quentindemetz 2y agoDassault has a cloud offering with 3DS Outscale
- pestaa 2y agoHow exactly did Scaleway give up? They keep releasing new cloud and serverless products. There's also IONOS.
- jononor 2y agoOVH is still in business, even if they had a fire 3 years ago. Both AWS and Google have had rather large fires.
- jamesblonde 2y agoOVH is quite good, actually. We are using their K8S offering and S3 to build a service. It works well.
- liotier 2y agoThe fire occurred in their old datacenter, built in an era when OVH was aggressively cheap and experimental. It is in no way representative of today's OVH.
- maeil 2y ago> This is something AWS is scrambling to address with its recent announcement of a €7.8 billion investment in an AWS European Sovereign Cloud, expected to launch its first region in Germany by the end of 2025. But will that be enough to regain the trust of European corporations Given the CLOUD Act and FISA, no it should not be enough to regain the trust of those European corporations that look for data sovereignty. As long as those exist, all proposed "sovereignty" guarantees by vendors that have their (or their parent company's) HQ in the US are entirely worthless and should be ignored.
- foota 2y agoThese sovereign clouds generally put the root in trust with a local operator so they physically can't be compelled to release information.
- bjornsing 2y agoWhat difference does that make, if the parent company is in the US and its executives can be physically compelled to send orders to the local operator?
- foota 2y agoThe operator isn't under the other company, so if they say "we need this data" they can just say no. Now potentially they could try to trick the operator, but I'm not sure a company could be compelled to do so under US law. While there doesn't appear to be any relevant cases, this would fall under compelled speech (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compelled_speech https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compelled_speech) and it seems like it would fall on the impermissible side to me.
- bjornsing 2y agoBut somehow the money still flows to Amazon Inc in the US? I don’t get it…
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- mathverse 2y agoYea this is so gonna work with them paying 50-60k/pa for engineers. Seriously DACH mentality and influence has been devastating on serious tech development in Europe
- maeil 2y ago> Schwarz Digits generated €1.9 billion in sales last year It's already working.
- isbvhodnvemrwvn 2y agoHow much of that is in sales to Schwarz group + SAP only?
- adamnemecek 2y agoI too have noticed this difference in mentality but I'd be curious to hear what do you think are the most salient differences.
- novagameco 2y agoWhat do you mean by DACH mentality?
- croisillon 2y agogerman speaking countries
- _nalply 2y agoNitpick: Luxemburg, Belgium (around Eupen), Italy (Tirol) and France (Alsace) are also German speaking countries. Historically, too: Poland, Czechia, Hungary and Romania, but German speaking communities have disappeared or are in massive decline. Disclaimer: this list of German speaking countries might be incomplete.
- croisillon 2y ago
- duxup 2y agoThis makes sense from a governance perspective. I would worry that it becomes a mandated / feature poor service whose customers are guaranteed not by competitiveness, but by government requiring it.
- arianvanp 2y agoGaia-X is a disaster. The article misrepresents it. Gaia-X is not a framework for what a European cloud should look like. This would be useful. In beautiful EU bureaucratic style It's a framework for how to talk about how a European Cloud could look like. It's not about technical standards. It's about how we can talk about how we can think of maybe eventually deciding on how we can come up with standards that might one day lead to talk about implementations. It represents to me everything that is wrong with the EU today. A bureaucratic monster that can't decide how to talk about things or come to any form of alignment.
- intunderflow 2y agoCan be shown by how everyone who actually produces cloud services of value quit Gaia-X very quickly Scaleway published an entire blog post on why they quit: https://www.scaleway.com/en/blog/full-steam-ahead-towards-a-true-multi-cloud-offering-to-deliver-on-broken-promises/ https://www.scaleway.com/en/blog/full-steam-ahead-towards-a-...
- awesomeMilou 2y ago> It represents to me everything that is wrong with the EU today. A bureaucratic monster that can't decide how to talk about things or come to any form of alignment. I think that the EU can very well find a consensus when it wants to, going so far to push for legislature that will be clearly thrown out by the ECJ or HUDOC (see Chat Control for great example). It's just that we also have a lot of "token projects" which serve for virtual signaling for topics where there is a lack of domestic competence. Gaia-X is one of these things, the idea of a "european cloud" as laughable to begin with, due to dependence on foreign technologies to facilitate it.
- raverbashing 2y agoYup https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/gaia-x-is-an-expensive-distraction/ https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/gaia-x-is-an-expensive-dis...
- opentokix 2y agoGaia-X is a place where the hasbeens of the yesteryear can poison any reasonable developent made by saying "We have always done it this way".
- znpy 2y agoIirc a while ago i saw an article about lidl offering it services (mainly server collocation) and the price was indeed interesting. Also, if lidl plays this right, there are a bunch of engineers in Europe, currently working for faangs in places like Dublin and London, highly skilled and and quite desperate to go and live somewhere with a lower cost of living.
- albertgoeswoof 2y agoI run a European cloud service, 80% of our customers are basically looking for a European alternative to the big clouds. The market is huge and in my opinion underserved. What makes it very exciting is that there not too much innovation required to compete
- shortrounddev2 2y agoThe European market has always seemed like a tertiary market compared to the US and Asia. I think that's because, despite having some raw number of euros to spend on a product, the European economy has struggled since 2008 compared to the US and Asia, and huge corps which are obsessed with growth don't see an accelerating future for Europe as a customer base.
- kergonath 2y agoEuropeans are mostly comfortable giving money to American companies, and there is not as much of a culture difference as with Asia, so there is no need for separate offerings specially for Europe. All big tech companies have several subsidiaries that seem to be doing quite well. It’s true that there are not as many European startups than American ones, but the market is there.
- namaria 2y agoWhich creates some juicy margin niches for smart developers to make a killing as independent contractors.
- dathinab 2y agoeven if it has struggled it still is a lot of purchasing power and cloud is an essential service for many companies and how things played out in recent years has created increasing insensitive to not use Amazone/Google/MS Cloud but it's marked which isn't really that visible on HN and similar US focused sites
- layer8 2y agoIs “Asia” a well-defined market? Honestly curious.
- mardifoufs 2y agoI don't get what's new about this apart from the typical EU related buzzwords. France alone already has OVH and Scaleway, which are actual cloud providers in the "AWS" sense, not just hosting providers. Like I get that this is part of the platform's marketing but I don't see the sovereignty (which is a rather cringy term imo, as it implies that something as big as the EU isn't sovereign) angles to this.
- alexey-salmin 2y ago> (which is a rather cringy term imo, as it implies that something as big as the EU isn't sovereign) angles to this. How will the sovereign EU stop the US from exercising the CLOUD act over the data stored in AWS in Europe?
- input_sh 2y agoThere's no way I could describe it without sounding conspiratorial, so I'm just gonna lean into it: imagine the EU-US relationship suddenly turning very hostile (like Russia-EU relationship already did), how long would it take before all of EU's tech suddenly stopped working? Not saying that's gonna happen or is even likely to happen, but I don't think investing money into bootstraping some sort of a backup is necessarily a bad thing. China's tech is already self-contained, to a lesser extent so is Russia's, the US is investing a lot in semiconductors just in case something happens to Taiwan, and India has already banned pretty much every Chinese app. The EU, on the other hand, is completely reliant on the US for core tech infrastructure and trying to address that. None of it makes sense economically, but essentially every superpower is doing something towards at least making it a possibility to "self-contain" their own tech sector. I don't even think this has anything to do with the current political climate (Russia-Ukraine war included), I think it's more in preparation for when climate change consequences start ramping up.
- ivan_gammel 2y ago> EU-US relationship suddenly turning very hostile The economies are too integrated for this scenario. There are big R&D centers of many American corporations in Europe, doing big part of their tech. They won’t move, instead in a very hypothetical “Russian” scenario they will change owner and continue to operate. I’m sure EU regions of AWS or GCP won’t cease to exist, for example. There are some services that are operated from USA, e.g. CloudFront, but that won’t be too hard to replace.
- kkfx 2y agoAs an European: cloud is someone else computer, sovereign computing means users own their iron, sw and data, as government, so a sovereign computing means a State own hw, sw and data belonging to it. That's ALMOST the case for most EU states so far, but less and less the case, and more and more with private partnership engendering public IT, which is public information, nervous system, witch is the OPPOSITE of sovereign computing and Gaia-X (a failed project anyway) it's the apex of such disgraced model. Oh BTW to be sovereign ALSO DESKTOP must be FLOSS, witch is almost not the case in any public administration. The hw since it's full of fw to the point of being de facto connected black box, network hw included, mush be open or state-made. Witch is not the case in the 99.9% periodic of the cases.
- jeffrallen 2y agoAs a fellow European, I'm perfectly content to use someone else's computer, as long as they have a legal responsibility to respect my privacy, i.e. not submitting to the USA Cloud Act.
- WA 2y agoSpeaking of: Is there an EU alternative to Netlify where I can basically upload/host a small static website for free, including custom domains and free SSL?
- mvanbaak 2y agoWhile 'for free' is something we all want (who wants to spend their money right) it is not a sustainable business case. And with prices of it/server/hosting in the EU being a lot higher then in other parts of the world, what you want is not going to be easy to find.
- kkfx 2y agoit's cloying how people (individuals and SMEs) forget that in the present time in vast part of the world we have FTTH with enough bandwidth and low enough ping that's MUCH better than a cheap VPS or someone else server. The only needed thing is a fixed IP, witch is pretty available anyway. A homeserver is much cheaper, not less monitored, much powerful and much more flexible than living on someone else computer. Since IPv6 it's not an option but a need, it's about time to IMPOSE a public global per host to any ISP, without clauses to avoid legally hosting a server because hey, that's how internet work, it's not a damn mainframe.
- opentokix 2y agoSeeing how they don't even seem to have a terraform module, I would say this will not grow to anything.
- MaKey 2y agoThey have a Terraform provider: https://registry.terraform.io/providers/stackitcloud/stackit/latest https://registry.terraform.io/providers/stackitcloud/stackit...
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- ofrzeta 2y agoLidl has their own IT company that is not mentioned in the article as far as I can see: https://it.schwarz/ https://it.schwarz/ (linked from the "Digits" page, though)
- bubblesnort 2y agoTheir self-checkouts run MS-Windows 7. That's just one step up from Vista. Their payment terminals run ancient OpenSSL versions. Their website until recently blocked searches for products whenever a substring matched a generic catch-all SQL injection blacklist. And their in-store discounts require you to have an Android or Apple device and install their proprietary app on it from Google Play or iTunes, and sign up for an account using your e-mail address and personal cellphone number (landlines and non-geographical numbers are disallowed). It also collects your data and sends it to Google and Facebook. This is the worst IT of any store I've seen.
- phantompeace 2y agoA POS device at a Target store was used to exploit systems in a completely different part of the Target infrastructure to allow CC details to be dumped. I think most supermarkets have lacklustre security.
- qwertox 2y agoI think their intention is to be an alternative to OEDIV [0] (Oetker* Daten- und Informationsverarbeitung KG), targeting European companies and governments. If you understand German and want to take a look at OEDIV's remarkable datacenter, der8auer posted a video [1] around two years ago giving a tour through their datacenter. Small but high-quality. This is what Schwarz Gruppe is after, though not as closed as OEDIV. [0] https://www.oediv.de/en/ https://www.oediv.de/en/ [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fMFo74rArBw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fMFo74rArBw * Yes, Oetker, the pizza-maker.
- lagrange77 2y ago> der8auer posted a video Does anyone remember 'derBauer', the Flash god?
- d_k_f 2y agoEvery single time I see the YouTube handle with the "8" in it linked/posted... There are a few videos of their previous homepage designs available on YouTube, it's an amusing window into the past. Right below the first one was another video about 2Advanced, which I also hadn't heard of since 20? years.
- lagrange77 2y agohttps://www.webdesignmuseum.org/gallery/derbauer-2003 https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/gallery/derbauer-2003
- Phelinofist 2y agoI remember a night some moons ago the update of our prod system hosted by OEDIV was scheduled. I spent most of the time in calls with them walking them through the disgusting number of installers for our components and supporting them with issues during upgrade. It took from 10pm to 10am the next day.
- Ylpertnodi 2y ago>der8auer Presumably pronounced derachter?
- hagbard_c 2y agoAnd there I was hoping to find that Lidl had seen the light and started to sell some type of home server under one of their many 'brand names' - Medion (not only Lidl but still), Silvercrest, Parkside, etc. A solidly built box of hardware with a reliable power supply, some slots for storage. A pre-installed Linux distribution with Proxmox on top, a container with Nextcloud (all German companies so they´d probably be willing to participate in this project). Some optional extras which make the thing function as wireless AP and router, media player, IoT hub etc. A number of downloadable container images for running your own mail/XMPP/Torrent/Blog/Search/Media/etc. services. A distributed encrypted backup option were you get to use other's storage for your backup purposes just as long as you offer your own storage for that purpose. That would be true 'sovereign computing'. Hm, maybe I should pitch this to them instead.
- elric 2y ago> A distributed encrypted backup option were you get to use other's storage for your backup purposes just as long as you offer your own storage for that purpose. Add an option to enable encrypted backups with Shamir's Secret Sharing [1] to some of your closest friends/relatives, so that a few of them together can decide to decrypt your stuff in the event of your untimely demise. Gimme a shout if you're hiring ;-) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shamir%27s_secret_sharing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shamir%27s_secret_sharing
- imhoguy 2y agoShould call it Lidl Cloud :)
- oneplane 2y agoI'm not entirely sure how this is something you can 'shift' to. It doesn't compete with the three big ones at all (not in features, not in price and not in scalability, and it has no integration or ecosystem to speak of), but if we were to see it for what it is, it might be more of a competitor to DigitalOcean. If what you need is a DigitalOcean, then yes, you could shift to this. But when you need a DigitalOcean, you're probably in the wrong place if you were using an AWS/GCP/AZ instead, which is also where this article seems to create a failed comparison. The play itself does make enough sense, there is a significant duplication in effort across companies, even if you're not doing hyperscaler things and using 'enterprise hardware', the people, processes and technology involved are pretty much the same in all places (which means you wonder what value is added by doing it internally at all -- spoiler it's usually legacy reasons, legacy governance and aversion to change). When there are enough regions and scalability (capacity, higher resolution consumption pricing, shorter cycle times) you could probably use this as a datacenter-in-the-cloud type of deal, which while 15 years too late is definitely still an improvement in so many businesses. We have some larger companies like Hetzner, OVH and Leaseweb which also try to pivot to more of an XaaS but that in itself is just adding to duplication and a fractured ecosystem. Will this actually work out? Only time will tell...
- haukem 2y agoSTACKIT is the Lidl cloud. Both companies are part of the Schwarz Gruppe. Their offering is here: https://www.stackit.de/en/ https://www.stackit.de/en/ You have to be a company to make business with them. You can not just sign up, you have to contact them first. There was a discussion about STACKIT some years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30853778 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30853778 I do not see anything about Gaia-X on their directly website, only when I search for it there are some older press releases.
- vander_elst 2y agoInteresting fact, it seems that their price catalog is a PDF https://www.stackit.de/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/240814_STACKIT_Pricelist_v1.0.21_A4.pdf?x49748 https://www.stackit.de/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/240814_STA... and not the usual price calculator other providers offer
- bastawhiz 2y agoThat feels on-brand for an organization that's still selling to each customer rather than providing a self service offering. If you need to talk to a person to get their services they'll surely be helping you understand your pricing.
- Palmik 2y agoPricing calculator was easy to find https://www.stackit.de/en/pricing/cloud-services/iaas/stackit-compute-engine/ https://www.stackit.de/en/pricing/cloud-services/iaas/stacki... Menu -> Compute Engine -> Pricing
- prmoustache 2y ago> You have to be a company to make business with them. You can not just sign up, you have to contact them first. This is not necessarily a bad strategy if they want to do something different than OVH/Scaleway/Hetzner. For instance, I understand you cannot possibly run a decent mail infra on the above hosting vendors IP ranges because they are so popular cheap self service hosting service they have been used a lot by spammers. So definitely not targetted at the lone developper starting a side gig but more as a vendor for the many larger EU institutions/companys that mostly kept their stuff on prem until now because of patriot act.
- EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 2y agoWait, are we that close to eradication by biomass eating killer robots?
- vander_elst 2y agoAren't there already European could providers? Scaleway, OVH, hetzner, what are they missing that only digital schwarz can provide?
- vander_elst 2y agoHas anyone first hand experience with gaia-x? Has anyone interacted with the association? On a very first look it seems like a public fund black hole, more and more money gets in nothing comes out, can anyone confirm/deny?
- rizzir 2y agoActually Lidl (or the mother company Schwarz Group to be more precise) tried to implement SAP and could not get it to work. So after burning more than 500 Mio. Euro they oficially quit with SAP in 2018 and decided to invest a lot in their own systems, both infrastructure and software. So in 2021 they bought XM Cyber, a cloud security specialist company from Israel and guess who is a big client of this company that is now owned by the Schwarz Group: SAP
- Havoc 2y agoHetzner seems to be holding their ground so it seems at least theoretically possible. Going to be hard to beat the scale effects of US big tech though
- atbpaca 2y agoEurope has OVH, Scaleway, etc, but why don't they grow as fast as AWS, Azure or Google Cloud? Besides being a cloud provider, there are some essential cloud-native applications missing. Take for example the area of Data Science: is Databricks or Snowflake available in any European cloud provider? It's not only a question of IaaS, it's having the same PaaS and SaaS offering as the others.
- throwaway2037 2y agoThe original from Financial Times is much better: https://www.ft.com/content/08eb1b45-91c2-4312-9d3c-ac5e4e557278 https://www.ft.com/content/08eb1b45-91c2-4312-9d3c-ac5e4e557...
- Bengalilol 2y agoMore and more customers are looking for solutions that could keep their data as near and safe as possible. I view this move as a very logical economic opportunity.
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- tintin_1A 2y agoWhere are the pub/sub magic overlays over kafka ? How does spark work on this ... does not seem very fit for large scale.
- wg0 2y agoShouldn't underestimate what determined group of people can achieve. As for feature parity is concerned, AWS was pretty small at the beginning. Just like some 12 years ago. Even VPCs didn't exist at one point and you could scan whole cloud from your VM. I have yet to see a company fail because the engineering team failed to build, whatever monolith, MEAN, micro services. It is almost always the product tier that fails to articulate and envision the product and place it on a pedestal where people can immediately and clearly see the value proposition. I hope that doesn't happen here. Some good products in this realm would be Hetzner and Scalway for example which is certainly good engineering no doubt but great product management apparently. .
- precommunicator 2y agoMy company's clients dislike US companies so much that we had to switch from very cheap AWS SES, European region, only used to send emails to very expensive (10x at least) European competitor. The AWS entry in the GDPR DPA was generating so many meetings that it was just worth it.
- set5think 2y agoObviously no one knows anything and only time will tell, but if I had to gander, my conclusion would not be that of the author’s: > As I pointed out in my previous blog post about the shifts in AWS, the one-stop-cloud-shop approach has shown cracks. Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Alibaba et al. won’t be able to cover all grounds, neither in tech domains, nor in geo’s. This doesn’t make much sense to me. What cracks? Aren’t aws regions the solution to geographic control to where your data and infra reside? Also, what tech domain does aws not have a solution for? I’m not saying the underdog can’t catch up. I’m saying that when aws made this major switch to offer their cloud, it was certainly a first-of-its-kind offering. Lidl offering competitive services to aws doesn’t sound that scary, especially considering that I don’t believe for a second that lidl’s cloud offering comes even close to what aws provides. At that point, if this competitor’s only real value proposition is that they’re “in Europe,” then I’m not sure how compelling of a selling point that is for me to give up everything else I get with my aws offering. Note: I am using aws as my example solely because it’s what I know best, not affiliated in any way with them as of this writing.
- sebstefan 2y agoThere is hardly a company I trust less than Lidl in the realm of tech "Case Study 12: Lidl’s €500 Million SAP Debacle" (2020): https://www.henricodolfing.com/2020/05/case-study-lidl-sap-debacle.html https://www.henricodolfing.com/2020/05/case-study-lidl-sap-d... They're already generating revenue so congratulations to them, but would I put my infrastructure in their hands for the long run?...
- remram 2y agoThis is always hard to compare because cloud offerings never exactly match (some include storage with their VMs, some include IOPS with their capacity, some bill bandwidth) but at first glance, their compute is cheaper than OVH and their storage is more expensive than OVH.
- teleforce 2y agoRecently there's HN discussions about Hetzner's strategic pricing based on their spartan business approaches [1]. On the back of my mind thinking that it's very similar to how Lidl operates its supermarket outlets and if Lidl ever operates hosting it would be very similar to Hetzner [2]. But now lol and behold unbeknownst to me that there's actually a Lidl cloud and it's not an April fool news. [1] Hetzner Pricing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41179371 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41179371 [2] How does Aldi keep their prices so low | Aldi Vs Lidl: Supermarket Wars | Channel 5 [video]: https://youtu.be/AhwycD3GMlM https://youtu.be/AhwycD3GMlM