Lidl's Cloud Gambit: Europe's Shift to Sovereign Computing

Gaia-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.

I 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

STACKIT is the Lidl cloud. Both companies are part of the Schwarz Gruppe.

Their offering is here: 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

I do not see anything about Gaia-X on their directly website, only when I search for it there are some older press releases.

> 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.

I 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/

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fMFo74rArBw

* Yes, Oetker, the pizza-maker.

I'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...

I 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.

Unrelated except it's the same company, reminded me of the failed SAP migration, https://www.retaildetail.eu/news/food/lidls-failed-it-projec...

Yea 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

Recently 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

[2] How does Aldi keep their prices so low | Aldi Vs Lidl: Supermarket Wars | Channel 5 [video]:

https://youtu.be/AhwycD3GMlM

Being 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?

And 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.

As 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.

Looking forward to cloud week at my local Lidl store.

Obviously 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.

Actually 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

Europe 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.

Iirc 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.

Shouldn'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.

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Has 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?

Should call it Lidl Cloud :)

There 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-d...

They're already generating revenue so congratulations to them, but would I put my infrastructure in their hands for the long run?...

Aren't there already European could providers? Scaleway, OVH, hetzner, what are they missing that only digital schwarz can provide?

This 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.

Seeing how they don't even seem to have a terraform module, I would say this will not grow to anything.

The original from Financial Times is much better: https://www.ft.com/content/08eb1b45-91c2-4312-9d3c-ac5e4e557...

Lidl has their own IT company that is not mentioned in the article as far as I can see: https://it.schwarz/ (linked from the "Digits" page, though)

More 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.

Anyone with experience?

Hetzner 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

Where are the pub/sub magic overlays over kafka ?

How does spark work on this ...

does not seem very fit for large scale.

My 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.

This 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.

Wait, are we that close to eradication by biomass eating killer robots?

This 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.