2mo ago

How Lidl accidentally took on the big guns of cloud computing. A unit of Europe’s largest retailer is offering IT services to companies wary of big providers such as Amazon and Google.

www.ft.com How Lidl accidentally took on the big guns of cloud computing

A unit of Europe’s largest retailer is offering IT services to companies wary of big providers such as Amazon and Google

BuyFromEU @europe.pub

www.ft.com /content/08eb1b45-91c2-4312-9d3c-ac5e4e557278

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22 comments

The Schwarz family is so damn rich... Their city calculates everything once with them and once without, because they make every "on average" statistic useless.
- They could just use the median
  
  Sure, but if neighbour cities use the average and you want to compare yourself with them...
  
  I'd go for the mode, it's the most representative.
- Spiders Schwaz.
- A prefect example of why average sucks and median rules

The article doesn't link it directly but I think their cloud platform is called stackit. This could be a good offering if all you need is a server capacity and a bit of monitoring but companies looking for an equivalent to things like Azure B2C or other "Cloud native" services wont find them there. Bert Hubert wrote about this a few months ago. Platforms like this are really cool but they wont sway any customers who look for fully featured services that they can use like building blocks for their applications.
- thanks. I was wondering whether they called parkside or silvercrest cloud.

Super interesting. It’s a similar story to Amazon’s: they were big enough to need their own infrastructure and ended up providing it too.
The big difference, from where I’m sitting, is Amazon has the same branding across the business and Schwarz Group doesn’t.

It's paywalled for me.
- https://archive.ph/I7UBp should be readable without the paywall
  
  <3

I don't want to say anything against their efforts because competition in a market is always great, but their product pricing and setup is just laughable.
Example: 4vCPU 16GB RAM Instance
Stackit(Scharz/Lidl): 120€/month, 4 locations
AWS: 110€/month, with saving plan: 60€/month, 30+ locations
OVH: 70€/month, 16+ locations
Hetzner: 7-12€/month, 5 locations
For who is the pricing designed? Super big companies where management is dumb enough to buy that crap? "We have to host there because our companies CEO knows their CEO" situations?
There are a ton of other EU companies that get the job done a lot better.
- It's not as bad as it seems in my quick little research. They don't have the scale of the other BIG cloud providers, so I could understand why it could be more expensive, but apparently for compute-optimized loads, they are the cheapest (of the big ones).
  Their storage is also apparently the cheapest compared to other BIG providers.
  If they are going for a higher service level and featureset than the cheapest clouds, then that also explains the price.
  Anyways, think this one example doesnt paint the picture properly (according to quick research, so I may be wrong, lemme know if u know i am).
- It all depends on how you sell it.
  My company, when I arrived, had everything with Rogers. Rogers.... Suuuuuucks. Its supposedly for enterprise level customers, the big ones, but you literally pay 3 times more for 5 times less hardware specs, a 4cpu 4gb Linux vps server with slow Io drives will cost you around $300.
  SLA? OVH claims 99.5%, iirc. The Rogers SLA I have here is basically"is it down? Go fuck yourself"
  Add to that about weekly to Monthly Rogers outages that can last anywhere from 30 minutes to 3 hours.
  I got one single $350 server at OVH and it has 80% of memory of all the 30 servers at Rogers. Couple that with (in personal experience) no downtime in 10 years that I've had servers there, I'd say OVH is vastly superior to Rogers
  Yet half of Canada and their mother still goes with Rogers because enterprise levels! They say so on the page! They even have huge building called Rogers arena, they must be grrrrreat!

give me a better duo than 'huge company with need for compute' and 'too much compute forcing companies to sell CPU hours for a fee'

Paywalled

Can't read the article (paywall) but how are Lidl's cloud services more significant than something like OEDIV owned by food manufacturer Dr. Oetker?
- From my very quick research, OEDIV seems to mostly offer managed hosting for IBM, SAP and Microsoft services, with tech support, setup help etc.
  StackIT from Lidl is a more general cloud offering, for instance offering more customisable options (like barebone VMs) for the companies that want to do things themselves

why do they have so much compute, though? are they also running a facial recognition madness on their "security" cameras, as is customary in the USA?

Sales of evs will drum up. Then in December trump\muskrat will extend it for American made evs.

22 comments