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Dutch central bank ditches AWS and chooses Lidl for European Cloud
- sammy2255 5mo agoLIDL servers LuL
- guywithahat 5mo ago> DNB Director Steven Maijoor announced last October that he intended to “set a good example” and switch to a European cloud, though he acknowledged that it “is not yet as robust or high-quality as the one from the U.S.” > Last year, the Dutch Central Bank (DNB) and the Netherlands Authority for the Financial Markets (AFM) warned that the Dutch financial sector had become too dependent on foreign IT service providers I wonder how much if this is a personal choice, and how much is pressure from the government. Banks are famously the first target of politicians, and it's common in China for exec's to publicly choose a national option under pressure from the CPP.
- wolfi1 5mo agoLidl is German, so, not fully national, IMHO
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- graemep 5mo agoIf they cannot provide it nationally, Germany seems a good place to have it, especially as they are both EU. At the very least a country dependent cloud services from multiple other countries is less dependent on any one of them than a country predominantly dependent on one (and most of Europe is currently dependent on US cloud providers).
- tgv 5mo agoAFAIK, the central bank is independent.
- Muromec 5mo agoIf the DNB says getting our clown computers from Americans is an operational risk, we believe it's an operational risk. Political or not.
- expedition32 5mo agoFor Dutch people money supercedes politics, religion and human life itself.
- rsynnott 5mo agoThis isn't a bank in the normal sense, it's the central bank.
- kjkjadksj 5mo agoCrazy that a discount grocer can trade blows with big american cloud compute.
- joaodlf 5mo agoNot necessarily trading blows, but LIDL is huge in all sorts of figures. From revenue to employment numbers.
- retired 5mo agoLIDL sells everything you need in your life in the middle aisle. Even cloud solutions.
- burner-phone73 5mo agoThe Schwarz Gruppe (owner of Lidl) makes about as much as Meta and Microsoft. So, yes, they're are big player.
- browningstreet 5mo agoDon't you mean that it's crazy that a discount grocer can trade blows with a bookseller?
- myroon5 5mo agoBut can a wool shoe company? https://ir.allbirds.com/news-releases/news-release-details/allbirds-inc-executes-50m-convertible-financing-facility https://ir.allbirds.com/news-releases/news-release-details/a...
- retired 5mo agoYears ago I was making the case that instead of digging ourselves into the Amazon eco-system with S3 storage, EC2 instances, DynamoDB and various other Amazon specific cloud products... we should just host virtual machines and have everything in there using open source products. People looked at me like they saw water burning but that would have made the dependency on the US a lot easier to sever. Just move the VM's.
- xfactorial 5mo agoThe whole business model is around “Optimization through custom tools”. We can go with your idea, sure: a few months in, an Account Manager from the cloud provider shows up and says your bill could be reduced by 50% if you just adopt some changes, using their custom, super optimized tools (“minor changes” will be the mantra). And now you have your own company looking back to you on how can they get those savings, people who don’t understand what a VM is and cannot differentiate salesforce from an elastic container, as everything is “cloud”, but heard “50% off”.
- walrus01 5mo agoPreventing this from happening requires a clued-in CTO and equivalent senior level leadership who can defend against such 'attack' methods and knows the difference between, for instance, paying a monthly recurring cost to host a Linux/KVM virtual machine and paying for some totally 'cloud' SaAs. Further, it needs people in decision making roles who understand and value the strategic differences between having an infrastructure concept that is trapped in one provider's proprietary software tooling ecosystem (aws, azure, etc), vs things built on open standards that are portable.
- palmotea 5mo ago> Preventing this from happening requires a clued-in CTO and equivalent senior level leadership who can defend against such 'attack' methods and knows the difference between, for instance, paying a monthly recurring cost to host a Linux/KVM virtual machine and paying for some totally 'cloud' SaAs. And the reality is eventually you'll get a clueless one, and everything will revert to the mean. And the mean is heavily influenced by marketing propaganda.
- pier25 5mo agoWait... Lidl has a cloud service now?
- walthamstow 5mo agoThe things you can find in the middle aisle!
- apparatur 5mo agoSure and it's on SALE right now if you have the customer loyalty card!
- storus 5mo agoSchwarz seems to be obsessed with how Amazon (book seller) created AWS and they are trying to do the same... with 5 people. Also Aleph Alpha + Cohere is a Lidl work as the current CEO of the former led Lidl digital division.
- scandox 5mo agoSo the 7,500 they say they're employing...is not true?
- ambicapter 5mo agoLidl is a grocery store chain, I'm assuming GP was talking about the amount of people actually working on the cloud.
- speedgoose 5mo agoYes I guess banks don’t mind the high prices of Lidl’s cloud. It’s very much not a discount cloud provider. They are costly unlike their physical discount grocery stores.
- Havoc 5mo agoPretty sure it's the oracle model - the advertised prices don't matter because it's all custom negotiated.
- tomschwiha 5mo agoThe title is heavy clickbait. To say I just bought a Porsche when it was actually a Volkswagen is also wrong. Just because they belong to the same owner doesn't make it the same brand.
- croes 5mo agoIt’s actually the other way around. Porsche is a Volkswagen but a Volkswagen isn’t necessarily a Porsche. VW bought Porsche
- AndroTux 5mo agoYes, that's what they're saying. LIDL doesn't have a cloud. The Schwarz Group does.
- fodkodrasz 5mo agoToo bad, a LIDL branded cloud would be something really well marketable. Cloudside services (a'la Parkside)... or something along these lines.
- retired 5mo agoImagine spinning up a Silvercrest instance for a database. Using W5 to distribute messages across the cloud. Using Parkside for object storage.
- manquer 5mo agoKinda, VW indeed owns Porche AG 100% today. However it was more complicated than that. Porche owned 50+% of Volkswagen at the time of Volkswagen buying them. Porche got over extended and leveraged buying Volkswagen . The management family is closely connected since the start and at the time in early 2010s 20% government ownership rule was just getting stuck down by European courts .
- ck45 5mo agoWell, it's more difficult. The original Volkswagen was designed by Ferdinand Porsche.
- semiquaver 5mo agoAldi has a cloud? Do you have to put a quarter in when you log into the console that you get back when you log out?
- actionfromafar 5mo agoAmazon has a cloud? Do you have to buy a book when you log in?
- MiinusMiinus 5mo agoI'm so happy that companies are ditching the big tech. Not enough fast enough imo.
- holoduke 5mo ago[flagged]
- vrganj 5mo agoThe last war Germany started famously ended 80 years ago. The last war the US started is still ongoing and was started by them a few weeks ago.
- holoduke 5mo agoYou really compare 40s Germany with the US? Nah
- vrganj 5mo agoI am comparing when the respective states last started wars to point out the absurdity of calling modern-day Germany warmongers.
- holoduke 5mo agoThey are warmongers. Their tone currently is war. They are investing in war. They are becoming a war nation again.
- vrganj 5mo agoAgain, they haven't started a war in 80 years. It sure seems like a more peaceful bet than the US, which started one like a month ago.
- hermanzegerman 5mo ago
- tjwebbnorfolk 5mo ago> will sign a major contract tomorrow Ok so nothing has actually happened. It's also not specified whether this is in addition to their AWS footprint, or if it's a migration. It will be interesting to see an update in 5 years on how this goes.
- tjwebbnorfolk 5mo ago> will sign a major contract tomorrow Ok so nothing has actually happened. These migrations are difficult and expensive, and often fail. It will be interesting to see an update in 5 years on how this went.
- helsinkiandrew 5mo agoHere’s the service: https://stackit.com/en https://stackit.com/en
- sourcecodeplz 5mo agoIsn't this how AWS also started? They built internal devops tools for them that were so good and expandable that they decided to give others access to them.
- Havoc 5mo agoYeah, though in this case the selling point is less about scale and more about data sovereignty. German companies are pretty touchy about storing data cross borders
- close04 5mo agoThe missing background piece is that the European Commission awarded a 180m EUR sovereign cloud contract to 4 European providers [0]. This framework agreement made the choice of national banks a lot more straight forward. [0] https://commission.europa.eu/news-and-media/news/commission-advances-cloud-sovereignty-through-strategic-procurement-2026-04-17_en https://commission.europa.eu/news-and-media/news/commission-...
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- Grappelli 5mo ago[dead]
- dethos 5mo agoMakes sense. I never worked with this particular provider, but I must say that for many (many) use cases, Europe has very capable providers, and the big US players are not necessarily the best choices.
- MaKey 5mo agoI've got experience with the LIDL cloud aka STACKIT and work for a STACKIT partner. Just drop me a message if you are interested. Two fun solutions implemented (fully automated via Terraform): Site-to-Site VPN between STACKIT and Azure using a LibreSwan VM and an Azure VPN Gateway FortiGate HA cluster in STACKIT - not a single ICMP packet got lost during failover
- petervandijck 5mo agoI just love that it’s Lidl, of all brands
- k__ 5mo agoEuropean central bank will probably go for Aldi.
- retired 5mo agoAldi Nord or Aldi Süd?
- tacker2000 5mo agoHofer
- retired 5mo agoTrader Joe cloud.
- pnt12 5mo agoThey're going with Scaleway, a French company. Seems like the owner is a billionaire with a few businesses, but neither La Redoute nor Intermarché! https://www.scaleway.com/en/news/scaleway-accelerates-its-european-expansion-with-three-major-milestones/ https://www.scaleway.com/en/news/scaleway-accelerates-its-eu...
- andrewstuart 5mo agoThey should run their own data center. Companies should have native capability to work computers, especially those whose business is pure information, like banks.
- junto 5mo agoLidl cloud is a resurgence in OpenStack? I used to have quite a few customer hosted at Rackspace in the early 2010’s and I always thought it sad they dropped the ball when they got bought out by private investment and they fired most of the talent. I loved their API and the docs were really good.
- rsynnott 5mo agoFortunately for them, Lidl's middle aisle deal this week happened to be cloud computing. (Tesco cloud compute will price-match the lidl cloud-compute, but only if you remember to scan your Tesco clubcard at the self-checkout while buying it.)
- spwa4 5mo agoHurray ... except no, this is just about the only way it could go that is worse than American Tech empires. All of the discussed alternatives (stackit, scaleway, aldi) are owned by European billionnaires. Stackit is owned by Dieter Schwarz (who inherited everything he has ever owned) Aldi cloud is owned by Beate Heister and Karl Albrecht (both children of the real founders, Karl and Theo Albrecht. Together they are probably the richest Germans) Scaleway is owned by Xavier Niel (free.fr, who was born high middle class and at least can be said to have built out his empire) The only owner here that is even remotely interested in the business is Xavier Niel. To add insult to injury, all 3 are known for being extremely cheap when it comes to wages (Xavier Niel less so than the others, but it's not great)
- xtiansimon 5mo agoLidl the grocery store chain, ha! Up yours Amazon.