Wasn't sure if April fools or not. German companies have launched so many of those "rivals" to AWS by now, all of them require you to call someone/send a letter/FAX to create a VM. I wonder if they understand that the success of cloud, SaaS and generally majority of modern, scalable businesses comes from the fact that it _can_ be self-served.
Strange, I never had to send a single FAX in my life in germany. Especially not for any cloud offerings located in EU/germany. I would LOVE to see proof for that.
This time is different: This is not backed by the govt or german telecom but by the richest German alive (> 50B net worth). I think (hope), the chances are much higher that he's in for the long run with an appropriate amount of ressources.
This may be due to unions. In one of my previous jobs we were providing a software for digital subscriptions to their news site. The plan was to also integrate with their SAP for offline subscriptions. We offered to do the integration in a way where a user would buy online and it would get inserted into their SAP via an API. This was a no go, since before they've had a couple of people doing this manually and they couldn't fire them due to unions so they decided we would be sending the orders for offline subscriptions to them and they'll physically enter it into SAP. I wish I was joking.
Strictly speaking, this is not Lidl (chain of grocery stores). Lidl is owned by the same parent company - Schwarz Gruppe, which has a pretty big digital branch with several companies focusing on different products (e-commerce, cloud infrastructure etc). StackIt is one of those companies.
It is good to see one more local competitor to AWS backed by the largest retailer in Europe, who also uses those solutions for their own e-commerce projects.
I don't know the answer to this question, but living in Germany and interacting with their products, I'd say they are pretty good at what they do -- for consumers. I don't use Amazon since years, but recently had to and was shocked that it's basically impossible to find anything, just hundreds of products and no way to filter through anything. Their competition is way ahead of them. So I don't know if this translates to IT / cloud / etc, but it's not like they are completely clueless.
And as others have noted it's not just Lidl, this group owns also Kaufland which also swallowed up another chain (Real) recently. So they are huge.
So, that's what Schwarz IT has been so actively recruiting for. I got contacted 3+ time, however each time it was a rather low tech position, right under some technically illiterate MBA chap, so I did not even bother submitting a resume.
I have serious doubt they would be able to mount a serious challenge to AWS. These German companies - DB, DHL, SAP just don't have cultures meritocratic enough to be competitive with the new boys. Not everything in the world is a post office or a rebar manufacture line.
I was an employee of the Kaufland IT back then, which then was integrated to the Schwarz IT some years ago. Only a small team worked on StackIt back then - it probably grew the last years, but most will not work on this.
I also don't think they will be a serious contendor to the current companies
Those Schwarz digital branches have the culture and structure that is not different from Berlin startups, only a bit more mature. I think they are capable.
I think they'll have a hard time finding people to staff that, Lidl has a long history of underpaying and abusing their personnel and maybe they think that if Amazon can get away with that that they qualify at some level but datacenter employees are not going to like being dealt with like that. Lidl as an employer has a trackrecord that would cause me to think twice about hosting with them, no matter what the price.
That said, being part of the same 'group' there might be enough insulation to avoid this link damaging the company, but since the Lidl connection is proudly mentioned on each page in the footer. I think that they either don't realize that it might be a risk to declare that so openly or they don't care in the same way that scammers don't care about you figuring out they are scammers, if you are offended by that then they probably don't want to hire you because you just might be aware of your market value.
For some more information about Lidl employer-employee relationships:
Anything that hosts anything is seen as a "competitor to AWS" since some people are able to boil down AWS to a "cloud host". Admittedly they've grown to do much much more specific things, but one could argue that's the center of their offering.
Yes. If I remember right Schwarz Group doesn't use AWS because they don't want to give money and data to a big competitor, but that doesn't make their hosting setup an "AWS competitor". And as far as I can see the site also doesn't claim anything like that, so this is a clear case of "don't editorizalize titles!"
Well you have a kubernetes cluser + various dbs and message brokers. This is what 99% of clients actually use in AWS. It makes sense that exactly this is part of the minimum viable product.
To be honest it took some scrolling but it does seem to offer some cloud services like managed databases, elasticsearch, rabbitmq, redis, k8s - this is not just barebone VM host.
Failures and problems with SAP integration are incredibly common, I would not be placing blame so hard on LIDL themselves. The root cause is usually that SAP goes for any new product / addon to whoever they feel the market leader is in the respective area, models their processes (usually without questioning them too much) and then packages this as a new product or addon.
New customers then have to either adapt their processes to the process of the "market leader" (no matter if they are fit or not for the purpose or are actually efficient) or they have to adapt the SAP workflows - and that is where it gets hairy as fuck and where the problems arise:
- ABAP programmers are low in supply and high in demand (as the role requires both DBA and general coding skills as well as a ton of SAP-specific knowledge and the patience to deal with the bullshit that is the SAP UI)
- add to that that most people buy SAP skills from third party consultants with all the bullshit that comes with that (inadequate oversight, juniors being sold as seniors, near- and offshoring with timezone and language differences as well as cultural differences)
- the further you deviate from the SAP-prepackaged process the harder any patch or heaven forbid major update becomes. If you fuck it up badly enough you are just finished with releasing the last patch and then you already are in crunch mode again for the next patch.
In my opinion and experience SAP is only relevant these days because of lock-in and "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" effect and because they are relatively quick at implementing law changes as code, not because the people who actually have to use it want to use it - quite to the contrary. And, speaking as a German, the fact that this company is just about the only major IT company that Germany has is both extremely sad and exemplary for German IT importance in general at the same time.
Failed is not the correct description, more like top management began to realize the longterm effects such a big SAP-integration would have on their processes, changed their mind against it and reversed their direction. Don't blame them for acting and axing such a huge project
Without speaking to their likelihood of success (enough posters have already spoken on this), one thing I think is interesting is Stack-it have limited scope to compute/storage/security and network orchestration resources.
It's almost like AWS before they expanded to having a mind numbing number of service offerings. Who can keep up with all these? Who, other than people training for cloud architect certifications?
I worry that AWS has lost focus on its core services and instead is trying to market every shiny new thing under the sun... I work in finance, my corp is in us-east region. I think we had like 3 AWS related incidents that caused serious production outages last year... All from use of core AWS services. Now we are looking to support cross-region fault tolerance to defend against this. Supporting such a strategy sounds like it's going to be quite expensive, and technically complex.
> STACKIT services are currently offered to the Group’s internal
> customers and are continuously optimised according to their
> requirements. In the future, it is also planned to offer the
> services on the external market.
"You need scalable enterprise cloud solutions for digital business processes while maintaining complete data integrity?"
Nitpicking here, but my god, can German companies/universities/organizations please start paying for native English speakers to do their copy-writing and STOP translating directly from German?
It's "Do you need". Not "You need..."
This is the typical translation of the German marketing "Du brauchst <blah>?" or "Du bist ein <blah>? Dann...". I see pattern this allthetime, such as "You are a student who wants to work on innovating projects? Then apply...".
This may sound like a rant, but I genuinely think these little details would go a long way to actually showing that the German economy does have some sort of international mindset. This persistence in sticking to these wrong ways just makes me think that 'OK this is another conservative old-school minded German company trying to play unicorn'. If there's no attention to detail or care for the little things on your front-page marketing website - your first contact with your customer - it just leaves me with a bad feeling about the parts I don't see.
I don't know why it frustrates me enough to write a comment in the middle of the day, I guess I really can't understand how global German corporations still, as a rule all make this same error, which I suspect is just the tip of the iceberg of a larger symptom of not wanting to think outside/beyond the DACH bubble. And I feel a sense of sadness that such a country with great prospects just drags its feet lazily into the the future.
Edit: I also see this all the time in Email correspondence, you can immediately tell if a person is a native German speaker because they don't capitalize the first letter in an English email after "Dear X, we are writing <blah>" (which would be 100% correct in German, but somehow no one teaches this in English classes in Germany that in English it is capitalized). For a country that loves rules, this drives me mad.
Edit2: This is definitely a rant and it triggered me emotionally for some odd reason. I concede that my interpretation is quite exaggerated, so please do excuse me! I'll leave the comment however because I'm curious to know whether any others feel the same way.
Edit3: I will also say that translating between German and English is hard as there are some fundamental differences in their structure. There are very colloquial ways to say or not say certain things. That is why native speakers are essential for such things.
Edit4: Please take this comment with a pinch of salt. This is the rant of an fatigued expat who decided to blow some off steam about the oddities of their host country that drive them bananas. For posterity, I will say there at least 10 amazing wonderful things about German culture that I love, for each odd cultural thing. But you know, at some point when you see something for the umpteenth time, something snaps inside of you and it all comes out, especially on a mid-week day like a Wednesday.
Having worked with them, I can assure you, it's gonna be a disaster.
I've been called into a project as a consultant, and it took them over 3 months to even get any credentials for VPN, let alone repositories.
I just can't see this working out in any shape or form.
This is some first-class Denglish here to begin with, but because of the wrap on the hyphenation it took me a while to realize they were not suggesting we "proof IT" nor stealing the grammar from Fridays For Future.
> Start your journey into digital transformation with our powerful cloud and colocation solutions.
Maybe their target market is companies that are not yet using computers?
Also, I love that one of their references is... Schwarz Group. And another one is owned by... wait for it... Schwarz Group. Which leaves one consulting company that I vaguely suspect might have some non-STACKIT relationship with Schwarz Group. References, check! /s
..and when you are a customer there you know that you are core business and not just on some service that might be ended any day due to some strategic coin flip. I have no idea how these sidecar business ever establish themselves in terms of trust (same certainly applies to early years AWS)
The only companies that have justifiable merit of saying they have launched a rival to AWS are either government backed entities, Snowflake or IBM and/or a joint venture of server manufacturers.
I have no clue why IBM cloud has such a poor market position considering how dominant of a business it was. But there is still hope. A combined forces attempt could be a viable strategy.
Snowflake has changed cloud service providers several times to my knowledge. In my opinion their offering and business philosophy is unique to allow themselves to venture into this business.
For government backed cloud you have Alibaba cloud as an example. Regional cloud service peovider with government funding or active monitoring is an evetuality in my opinion. The Ukraine situation proves my point. Keep an eye out on India for this. I feel like the govt is gonna give it a shot before 2030. The reason behind this deserves its own article.
I have this vision that all the products will be "similar" but just different enough from the originals to avoid a lawsuit, just like the stores. So, Radshift, S2+1 storage, Appflower, DynomiteDB, etc.
Wonder how long until we get our first request to add support for this to infracost https://github.com/infracost/infracost? At least the price list looks a lot simpler than AWS / Azure / GCP - more like UpCloud! Though honestly, if it starts to work, I'm sure the number of prices/services will grow exponentially.
[+] [-] gpjanik|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] KingOfCoders|4 years ago|reply
Have ordered servers from Hetzner online for the last 20 years, since their cloud offering via API/cli.
[+] [-] exar0815|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] flexie|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ramboldio|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jwsteigerwalt|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rgavuliak|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ivan_gammel|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] belter|4 years ago|reply
"Electricity prices in Germany ranked amongst highest globally" (2021):
https://www.iamexpat.de/expat-info/german-expat-news/electri...
[+] [-] locallost|4 years ago|reply
And as others have noted it's not just Lidl, this group owns also Kaufland which also swallowed up another chain (Real) recently. So they are huge.
[+] [-] tut-urut-utut|4 years ago|reply
If you have an example of a German IT company requiring a fax, please share, so I can mock my German co-workers ;)
[+] [-] asah|4 years ago|reply
(They rock)
[+] [-] rvz|4 years ago|reply
Wasn't sure if you were paying attention or not? [0]
What is wrong with having competition?
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23151069
[+] [-] frenchman99|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] slig|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mpfundstein|4 years ago|reply
i wonder btw... are you German? ;-)
[+] [-] luciusdomitius|4 years ago|reply
I have serious doubt they would be able to mount a serious challenge to AWS. These German companies - DB, DHL, SAP just don't have cultures meritocratic enough to be competitive with the new boys. Not everything in the world is a post office or a rebar manufacture line.
[+] [-] pluc|4 years ago|reply
I don't see it happening, at least not with what they're showing.
[+] [-] carstenhag|4 years ago|reply
I also don't think they will be a serious contendor to the current companies
[+] [-] ivan_gammel|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mkj|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jacquesm|4 years ago|reply
That said, being part of the same 'group' there might be enough insulation to avoid this link damaging the company, but since the Lidl connection is proudly mentioned on each page in the footer. I think that they either don't realize that it might be a risk to declare that so openly or they don't care in the same way that scammers don't care about you figuring out they are scammers, if you are offended by that then they probably don't want to hire you because you just might be aware of your market value.
For some more information about Lidl employer-employee relationships:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lidl#Working_conditions_and_la...
[+] [-] sidcool|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pluc|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] detaro|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] luciusdomitius|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] moonchrome|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lozenge|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fguerraz|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sva_|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mschuster91|4 years ago|reply
New customers then have to either adapt their processes to the process of the "market leader" (no matter if they are fit or not for the purpose or are actually efficient) or they have to adapt the SAP workflows - and that is where it gets hairy as fuck and where the problems arise:
- ABAP programmers are low in supply and high in demand (as the role requires both DBA and general coding skills as well as a ton of SAP-specific knowledge and the patience to deal with the bullshit that is the SAP UI)
- add to that that most people buy SAP skills from third party consultants with all the bullshit that comes with that (inadequate oversight, juniors being sold as seniors, near- and offshoring with timezone and language differences as well as cultural differences)
- the further you deviate from the SAP-prepackaged process the harder any patch or heaven forbid major update becomes. If you fuck it up badly enough you are just finished with releasing the last patch and then you already are in crunch mode again for the next patch.
In my opinion and experience SAP is only relevant these days because of lock-in and "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" effect and because they are relatively quick at implementing law changes as code, not because the people who actually have to use it want to use it - quite to the contrary. And, speaking as a German, the fact that this company is just about the only major IT company that Germany has is both extremely sad and exemplary for German IT importance in general at the same time.
[+] [-] luciusdomitius|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ce4|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] coffeeblack|4 years ago|reply
“I have an idea…”
[+] [-] marcosdumay|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cphoover|4 years ago|reply
It's almost like AWS before they expanded to having a mind numbing number of service offerings. Who can keep up with all these? Who, other than people training for cloud architect certifications?
I worry that AWS has lost focus on its core services and instead is trying to market every shiny new thing under the sun... I work in finance, my corp is in us-east region. I think we had like 3 AWS related incidents that caused serious production outages last year... All from use of core AWS services. Now we are looking to support cross-region fault tolerance to defend against this. Supporting such a strategy sounds like it's going to be quite expensive, and technically complex.
[+] [-] jmillikin|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andrew_eit|4 years ago|reply
Nitpicking here, but my god, can German companies/universities/organizations please start paying for native English speakers to do their copy-writing and STOP translating directly from German?
It's "Do you need". Not "You need..."
This is the typical translation of the German marketing "Du brauchst <blah>?" or "Du bist ein <blah>? Dann...". I see pattern this all the time, such as "You are a student who wants to work on innovating projects? Then apply...".
This may sound like a rant, but I genuinely think these little details would go a long way to actually showing that the German economy does have some sort of international mindset. This persistence in sticking to these wrong ways just makes me think that 'OK this is another conservative old-school minded German company trying to play unicorn'. If there's no attention to detail or care for the little things on your front-page marketing website - your first contact with your customer - it just leaves me with a bad feeling about the parts I don't see.
I don't know why it frustrates me enough to write a comment in the middle of the day, I guess I really can't understand how global German corporations still, as a rule all make this same error, which I suspect is just the tip of the iceberg of a larger symptom of not wanting to think outside/beyond the DACH bubble. And I feel a sense of sadness that such a country with great prospects just drags its feet lazily into the the future.
Edit: I also see this all the time in Email correspondence, you can immediately tell if a person is a native German speaker because they don't capitalize the first letter in an English email after "Dear X, we are writing <blah>" (which would be 100% correct in German, but somehow no one teaches this in English classes in Germany that in English it is capitalized). For a country that loves rules, this drives me mad.
Edit2: This is definitely a rant and it triggered me emotionally for some odd reason. I concede that my interpretation is quite exaggerated, so please do excuse me! I'll leave the comment however because I'm curious to know whether any others feel the same way.
Edit3: I will also say that translating between German and English is hard as there are some fundamental differences in their structure. There are very colloquial ways to say or not say certain things. That is why native speakers are essential for such things.
Edit4: Please take this comment with a pinch of salt. This is the rant of an fatigued expat who decided to blow some off steam about the oddities of their host country that drive them bananas. For posterity, I will say there at least 10 amazing wonderful things about German culture that I love, for each odd cultural thing. But you know, at some point when you see something for the umpteenth time, something snaps inside of you and it all comes out, especially on a mid-week day like a Wednesday.
[+] [-] unfocussed_mike|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _druu|4 years ago|reply
Having worked with them, I can assure you, it's gonna be a disaster. I've been called into a project as a consultant, and it took them over 3 months to even get any credentials for VPN, let alone repositories.
I just can't see this working out in any shape or form.
[+] [-] biztos|4 years ago|reply
proof IT with STACKIT!"
This is some first-class Denglish here to begin with, but because of the wrap on the hyphenation it took me a while to realize they were not suggesting we "proof IT" nor stealing the grammar from Fridays For Future.
> Start your journey into digital transformation with our powerful cloud and colocation solutions.
Maybe their target market is companies that are not yet using computers?
Also, I love that one of their references is... Schwarz Group. And another one is owned by... wait for it... Schwarz Group. Which leaves one consulting company that I vaguely suspect might have some non-STACKIT relationship with Schwarz Group. References, check! /s
[+] [-] Copenjin|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] usrusr|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wongarsu|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bitlax|4 years ago|reply
Sometimes people will post a React template on HN with the title "How to Build Twitter."
[+] [-] anyfactor|4 years ago|reply
I have no clue why IBM cloud has such a poor market position considering how dominant of a business it was. But there is still hope. A combined forces attempt could be a viable strategy.
Snowflake has changed cloud service providers several times to my knowledge. In my opinion their offering and business philosophy is unique to allow themselves to venture into this business.
For government backed cloud you have Alibaba cloud as an example. Regional cloud service peovider with government funding or active monitoring is an evetuality in my opinion. The Ukraine situation proves my point. Keep an eye out on India for this. I feel like the govt is gonna give it a shot before 2030. The reason behind this deserves its own article.
[+] [-] mwexler|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] hkh|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] KingOfCoders|4 years ago|reply