Years 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.
The 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”.
> Do people actually take claims like that from glorified salesmen seriously?
People who know the tech, no
Non-technical middle management types, yes. It produces revenue when done aggressively enough, google "solarwinds sales people" for many anecdotal examples of extreme persistence. Not that I agree with it.
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.
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.
Most cloud VMs have network-attached storage working through a billing layer, and its IOPS numbers are pathetic. This makes running your own DB in a cloud VM much less reasonable. Now you can use local NVMe, but you still have to set up your own failover.
The original promise of the cloud is "you pay us less than you pay your sysadmins", which is not entirely unreasonable, especially at early stages.
Of course running on bare metal from Europe's own Hetzner is even more cost-efficient, if you already have a lot of sysadmin chops.
The 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.
Yeah, kind of. Lidl and Kaufland is owned by the Schwarz Group. They have been busy replicating the AWS orgin story. Their cloud is called StackIT. I've worked with them. Still some room to grow but a solid foundation. I like that competition is back on
Schwarz 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.
Schwarz Gruppe includes Schwarz Digits, which include StackIT. 7500 is the number of employees at Digits, which also includes online marketplaces like Kaufland e-commerce, so definitely not all of them work on the sovereign cloud.
the parent company (Schwarz Group) has over half a million employees and makes something like 200 billion in revenue per year, I think calling it a discount grocer is underselling it a bit lol.
> 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.
If 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).
Years 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.
This is great, your suggestion to replace s3 and ddb is to run some VMs?
I don’t blame people for being skeptical
The 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”.
Do people actually take claims like that from glorified salesmen seriously?
If a car salesman told me I could save 50% of my fuel bill from driving their special car a certain way I'd laugh at them.
They're probably not wrong, if they're talking about hypermiling a Prius
> Do people actually take claims like that from glorified salesmen seriously?
People who know the tech, no
Non-technical middle management types, yes. It produces revenue when done aggressively enough, google "solarwinds sales people" for many anecdotal examples of extreme persistence. Not that I agree with it.
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.
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.
Most cloud VMs have network-attached storage working through a billing layer, and its IOPS numbers are pathetic. This makes running your own DB in a cloud VM much less reasonable. Now you can use local NVMe, but you still have to set up your own failover.
The original promise of the cloud is "you pay us less than you pay your sysadmins", which is not entirely unreasonable, especially at early stages.
Of course running on bare metal from Europe's own Hetzner is even more cost-efficient, if you already have a lot of sysadmin chops.
Nah.. Amazon started with “ephimeral” compute. That was the whole thing why you needed another storage layer
Unlike most VPSes
The 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.
Yes 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.
Wait... Lidl has a cloud service now?
Yeah, kind of. Lidl and Kaufland is owned by the Schwarz Group. They have been busy replicating the AWS orgin story. Their cloud is called StackIT. I've worked with them. Still some room to grow but a solid foundation. I like that competition is back on
Schwarz 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.
So the 7,500 they say they're employing...is not true?
Schwarz Gruppe includes Schwarz Digits, which include StackIT. 7500 is the number of employees at Digits, which also includes online marketplaces like Kaufland e-commerce, so definitely not all of them work on the sovereign cloud.
Lidl is a grocery store chain, I'm assuming GP was talking about the amount of people actually working on the cloud.
Lidl has 375,000 employees. They have stated they employ 7,500 people in their digital services division.
Yeah, Lidl and Kaufland are store chains, with 14200 stores combined. 7500 employees is just Schwarz Digits, the digital services division.
Sure and it's on SALE right now if you have the customer loyalty card!
The things you can find in the middle aisle!
Crazy that a discount grocer can trade blows with big american cloud compute.
Don't you mean that it's crazy that a discount grocer can trade blows with a bookseller?
LIDL sells everything you need in your life in the middle aisle. Even cloud solutions.
It's going to be hard getting that angle grinder I've never needed when there's a line of CTO's blocking the aisle
But can a wool shoe company? https://ir.allbirds.com/news-releases/news-release-details/a...
The Schwarz Gruppe (owner of Lidl) makes about as much as Meta and Microsoft. So, yes, they're are big player.
Lidl doesn‘t do that. It is just a grocery discounter, one company of the many in that corporate structure, and one of the users of that cloud.
Not necessarily trading blows, but LIDL is huge in all sorts of figures. From revenue to employment numbers.
the parent company (Schwarz Group) has over half a million employees and makes something like 200 billion in revenue per year, I think calling it a discount grocer is underselling it a bit lol.
> 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.
Lidl is German, so, not fully national, IMHO
If 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).