[HN Gopher] Stackit: Cloud and Colocation
___________________________________________________________________
Stackit: Cloud and Colocation
Author : FlyingSnake
Score : 230 points
Date : 2022-03-30 11:36 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.stackit.de)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.stackit.de)
| bitlax wrote:
| > "rival"
|
| Sometimes people will post a React template on HN with the title
| "How to Build Twitter."
| londons_explore wrote:
| So, when I buy a $5 bag of potatoes from lidl, how much of that
| money is going to pay for these servers?
|
| I would _hope_ that for a retail business like Lidl, far less
| than 1% of the revenue goes into IT staffing and systems costs. I
| worry that the number is closer to 10%.
| tssva wrote:
| Lately I would consider myself lucky to find a bag of potatoes
| at Lidl. In the US at least they seem to be struggling to keep
| shelves stocked. I have 2 Lidl locations within 15 minutes of
| me and for the last few months the shelves have been pretty
| bare at both. To fill them up they have started stocking many
| more name brands which are not priced competitively with other
| grocery stores.
|
| I understand there are currently supply issues but the Aldi
| across the street from one of the Lidl locations isn't having
| this severe of an issue. The traditional grocery store chains
| in the area also don't seem to be having anywhere near the same
| level of supply issues even for their store brands.
| fullstop wrote:
| I'm not familiar with large European companies, but is this kind
| of like Aldi offering AWS-like services? Clancy's Cloud Compute,
| and Casa Mamita's Message Queues?
| Keyframe wrote:
| Yeah, Lidl and Kaufland.. kind of absurd, just like amazon
| launching computer infrastructure project.
| k__ wrote:
| I will wait for the Aldi offering.
| athenot wrote:
| Cloud Hosting, in the Center Aisle of Lidl, next to the other
| random items for sale.
|
| In all fairness, this move makes sense to monetize any surplus
| they have in DC capacity. In terms of competition, their offering
| competes more with Equinix and the like than with AWS.
| Garlef wrote:
| Not a single mention of infrastructure as code or serverless ...
| :shrug:
| gpjanik wrote:
| 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.
| slig wrote:
| Tried to use IBM Cloud, they wanted my passport for
| verification. Big nope.
| locallost wrote:
| 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.
| frenchman99 wrote:
| There are also PaaS providers in Germany, such as Fortrabbit
| for PHP, which do a great job. Competes with some parts of AWS.
| exar0815 wrote:
| 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.
| sorokod wrote:
| When switching cell phone number away from Vodafone de I was
| required to send a fax. A data point rather than proof.
| vdfs wrote:
| Some even use Telegram
| belter wrote:
| German Newspaper (2018):
|
| "...Two-thirds of German companies regularly use faxes,
| whereas only half of them use video conferencing
| technologies, and just one-third use messaging services or
| online collaboration tools..."
|
| https://www.handelsblatt.com/english/companies/digitization-.
| ..
| progre wrote:
| Not proof. The question was about cloud companies.
| belter wrote:
| The second part of the comment yes. The first was about
| how pervasive the use of fax was within German business.
| But in Japan it's worst:
|
| "Japan's reliance on fax machines lambasted by
| coronavirus doctor": https://www.independent.co.uk/news/w
| orld/asia/coronavirus-ja...
|
| "Japan Can't Get Rid of the Fax Machine With Offices
| Demanding It Stays": https://www.insider.com/japan-cant-
| get-rid-the-fax-machine-o...
| wongarsu wrote:
| 86% of German companies employ 10 or fewer people [1]. I'm
| not why we would expect them to use online collaboration
| tools or video conferencing pre-pandemic?
|
| Fax still being common is true though, it's mostly used as
| a quicker alternative to mail with established legal
| standing and more convenient than rolling out electronic
| signature schemes. You can still live and work without a
| fax in Germany, you will just be sending more letters. I've
| never sent a fax or letter to a German cloud provider
| though (despite using several of them)
|
| 1: https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/1929/umfr
| age/...
| belter wrote:
| Not sure how they plan to offer competitive prices.
|
| "Electricity prices in Germany ranked amongst highest globally"
| (2021):
|
| https://www.iamexpat.de/expat-info/german-expat-news/electri...
| b3orn wrote:
| Just like anyone else having datacenters in Germany. AWS and
| Hetzner come to mind. Even though end customer electricity
| prices are among the highest not just globally but especially
| within Europe electricity prices for businesses with high
| demand are generally much lower and even ignoring that
| electricity prices won't have much of an effect on product
| prices.
| locallost wrote:
| It's because of heavy taxation, but the industries pay a lot
| less since they get taxed less.
| jhgb wrote:
| What percentage of cloud service costs as paid for by
| customers is electricity cost?
|
| BTW what you're showing here is small consumer electricity
| rates. _Large_ consumers of electricity in Germany have
| significant fee exemptions. It 's one of the reasons why
| small consumers have it more expensive: in Germany, lots of
| the costs are offloaded away from the industrial users.
| belter wrote:
| One important percentage. Solutions development and other
| overhead's also count naturally.
|
| "Data Center Power Costs":
|
| "...In a data center, typically 20-40 % of the operating
| cost is related to data center power costs..."
|
| https://greenmountain.no/2020/07/01/data-center-power-
| costs/
|
| Also in the article above there this bar chart:
| https://greenmountain.no/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Cost-
| of-...
|
| were once more Germany costs for electricity are so much
| higher than anybody else.
|
| "How Much Does it Cost to Power One Rack in a Data
| Center?":
|
| https://www.nlyte.com/blog/how-much-does-it-cost-to-power-
| on...
|
| "...The energy cost to power a single server rack in a data
| center in the US can be as high as almost $30,000 a year,
| depending on its configuration. In a data center with 100
| cabinets, the cost to power those racks each year can be
| over $3 million. Data center professionals need to ensure
| that they are correctly monitoring energy consumption and
| efficiently managing capacity..."
| jhgb wrote:
| I was not talking about costs to the data center
| operator. I was talking about _what the cloud customers
| pay_. If you 're insinuating that 40% of cloud service
| pricing is electricity, surely that must be a cloud
| service operating at a _major_ loss because only a small
| fraction of a cloud service cost is the data center cost.
| belter wrote:
| I am not insinuating that. I am arguing that a major part
| of a data center costs is electricity, and that an
| important percentage of what cloud customers pay comes
| from that data center cost. My comment was clear that was
| not the only cost for cloud providers.
| jhgb wrote:
| The thing is, price tags for cloud services are so much
| higher than what data center costs would be for hosting
| an equivalent service yourself that I doubt that the
| electricity rate difference would make a cloud service in
| Germany outright uncompetitive. What is 40% in data
| center cost may very well be <10% in cloud service
| pricing.
| ivan_gammel wrote:
| 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.
| rgavuliak wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| mpfundstein wrote:
| can you name a few rivals?
|
| i wonder btw... are you German? ;-)
| asah wrote:
| Hetzner has entered the chat.
|
| (They rock)
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| "all of them require you to call someone/send a letter/FAX to
| create a VM."
|
| Have ordered servers from Hetzner online for the last 20 years,
| since their cloud offering via API/cli.
| dazc wrote:
| Hetzner requested a copy of my UK passport though.
|
| An image of a passport proves nothing btw, especially since
| Hetzner is not a UK Govt Agency, that I am aware of, and has
| zero methods of authenticating such 'evidence' of ID.
| rmbyrro wrote:
| > An image of a passport proves nothing btw
|
| It may prove a fraudster have basic Web searching skills.
| [1]
|
| If someone is willing to do something wrong, why these
| companies imagine they wouldn't provide a fake document ID?
|
| Imagine one is spinning up a Hertzner VM to hack and steal
| something or run a DDoS attack. The minute they see:
| "upload your passport ID", who thinks they'll go "oh no,
| we're busted, let's work honestly instead".
|
| It's almost childish how ridiculous online KYC (know your
| customer) processes are.
|
| [1] https://www.google.com/search?q=example+of+british+pass
| port+...
| maccard wrote:
| It's not "just" a passport photo, it's a photo of a
| passport with a name that matches the payment method.
| nopzor wrote:
| how are they going to know that the name matches the
| credit card?
| hansel_der wrote:
| idk, how do you compare strings?
| jensus wrote:
| I've not needed to verify identity to spin up VPS or order
| storage boxes. For what reason did you have to verify
| yourself?
| dazc wrote:
| I assumed because I was not an EU citizen?
| belter wrote:
| No, they ask for EU citizens also.
| tommek4077 wrote:
| Hetzner: Excuse us Mr. S. Pamking from Armenia, paying
| with a credit card of an elderly french lady, could you
| please send us some id? After that we will gladly spin up
| your 100 VPS Mail-Servers.
| erklik wrote:
| > Excuse us Mr. S. Pamking from Armenia, paying with a
| credit card of an elderly french lady, could you please
| send us some id?
|
| Amazon's cool with it. I guess they don't care as much? I
| do wonder where the fraud prevention requirements come
| from. It's an interesting question if they are even for
| fraud prevention.
| mkl wrote:
| I am not an EU citizen, but Hetzner didn't ask me for any
| ID.
| belter wrote:
| How long ago was that?
|
| "Well, there goes the Privacy - Hetzner Hosting" https://
| www.reddit.com/r/privacytoolsIO/comments/b5qp08/well...
| mkl wrote:
| Okay, looks like it was just before that.
| vruiz wrote:
| I just signed up over the weekend for a simple storage
| box. Today I realized after contacting their support that
| order was paused pending identity verification, they use
| something calles idenfy.
| detaro wrote:
| Plenty providers have verification only when something
| seems "off" in some way. Amazon has both lots of
| experience and data for payment verification and the
| margin to absorb fraud costs that do go through, smaller
| providers not so much.
| smoe wrote:
| I opened two accounts (different emails, credit cards,
| billing address) in the span over two years from
| Colombia. First one worked perfectly fine, but for the
| second one they wanted me to provide id before spinning
| up anything. So not sure if this was introduced recently
| or if they have some system that flags accounts under
| certain conditions to provide additional info that I
| tripped the second time.
| gnfargbl wrote:
| Hetzner aren't aiming to prove your identity. They're most
| likely aiming to reduce their fraud risk by requiring you
| to have a relatively-hard-to-fake document which matches
| your payment details.
|
| In my case they just wanted a copy of my company
| registration certificate.
| bayindirh wrote:
| I assume it happened while the UK was in the EU. You can
| verify a passport electronically via the identifiers via
| the EU border control network, AFAIK.
|
| So, it's enough of a verification.
| wongarsu wrote:
| The usefulness depends on whether it's an external or an
| internal requirement. For something Hetzner need themselves
| it's quite useless. If there's an external requirement to
| verify the identity of the customer (say to shield them in
| case of people renting servers for criminal purposes or
| whatever) then an image of your passport proves that
| Hetzner tried to verify your identity and that you forged a
| government document to trick them.
|
| Of course today we have better methods, but Hetzner was
| founded in the dot.com bubble and since then focused their
| innovation on providing cheap and reliable servers, not on
| changing business processes that work (or making pretty
| interfaces).
| tankenmate wrote:
| generally when I've been asked for my passport details
| from a Iaas / PaaS / SaaS provider it has been for AML
| /KYC purposes; so it is like you say, they don't need to
| know the details per se, just that they've forwarded it
| on to an external body / company and that it has been
| checked.
| mhitza wrote:
| Hetzner had me wait one billing cycle (as a new account)
| before they allowed me to request restriction to port 25, or
| vm, load balancers, etc limits to be lifted.
| daneel_w wrote:
| I tried to sign up for a private account with Hetzner some 4
| or 5 years ago, and they requested a scanned copy of my ID
| card or passport to proceed. I can understand it as they get
| legally entangled in any eventual abuse that may occur on
| their systems, but also, I can't understand it. Additionally,
| scanning and digitally sharing personal identification
| documents is illegal in some European countries under anti-
| forgery laws concerning important documents and banknotes
| etc.
| flexie wrote:
| We've used Hetzner for years. We never called or faxed them.
| Great service, by the way.
| ramboldio wrote:
| 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.
| EugeneOZ wrote:
| Still, this site has no prices, only "contact us".
| ramboldio wrote:
| I think, the long-run is much more important than whatever
| the specific feature set it rn. (Also, actually talking to
| people might be more of a feature than a bug, after all?)
| EugeneOZ wrote:
| No, talking to people is stressful and it's unreliable.
| wasmitnetzen wrote:
| There is a "Prices" link at the top?
| EugeneOZ wrote:
| Only "from..." prices - I can not compare their prices to
| AWS with the same resources.
| [deleted]
| tut-urut-utut wrote:
| While the bureaucracy certainly applies to German government,
| companies here are no better and no worse than anywhere in the
| world.
|
| If you have an example of a German IT company requiring a fax,
| please share, so I can mock my German co-workers ;)
| belter wrote:
| Does Health Care counts?
|
| "German health care: Tackling COVID with paper, pen and a fax
| machine": https://www.dw.com/en/german-health-care-tackling-
| covid-with...
| tut-urut-utut wrote:
| No, Health care is a government institution, not a private
| company.
| hansel_der wrote:
| not to dispute the point in light of the question, but:
|
| german health-care is thoroughly privatized, thou heavily
| regulated by the government.
| jwsteigerwalt wrote:
| Had to send documents to substantiate the business location on
| account creation, but nothing asynchronous after that.
| rvz wrote:
| > Wasn't sure if April fools or not.
|
| 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
| anyfactor wrote:
| 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.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| Most of these AWS alternatives seem to be based on OpenStack,
| and there are many hosters around the world who offer the AWS
| services most people use. EC2+S3+EBS+load balancing is all most
| businesses probably need. Add some mid-2000s style hosted
| databases and you're probably set up. Truthfully, most
| businesses don't even need all that, but modern development
| practices tend not to care too much about efficiency.
|
| All you really need to start competing with AWS is a data
| center and a shiny dashboard. They already had the data center
| for their own use, so extending it to provide IT services is
| quite a logical next step.
|
| Granted, STACKIT isn't as complete an offering like Open
| Telekom Cloud, but it's close enough to matter.
| anyfactor wrote:
| That is a very good point. After I made that comment I kept
| wondering what is the real difference of traditional private
| data centers and big cloud. Like they do 99% of what the
| cloud companies provide. It is all about the buzzword.
|
| I tell interviewers that I don't use AWS or GCP because I
| don't need to use it. I use my RPI where I can use
| docker/virtual environment, SSH/SFTP, use it as a NAS but it
| is always a hard sell. In the last 5 years the term "Linux
| Experience" has been switched to "AWS Experience" yet they
| require exact same skill set! The only issue is that billing
| dashboard. But beyond that I wonder, has things really
| changed.
| ShroudedNight wrote:
| I don't know what the status is now, but back when I was
| working for IBM, their Bluemix offering demonstrated a complete
| lack of commitment to operational excellence with seemingly
| routine downtime, with an undercurrent of "It's 1700, time to
| sod off for the day" regardless of the state of their service.
|
| It also didn't help that they seemed intent on paying 35+% less
| than other competing tech companies.
| anyfactor wrote:
| I am big on B2B businesses. I think the higher bureaucracy
| the better moat! But I think, IBM really tested this
| philosophy to its breaking point.
|
| My sentiment is that IBM Cloud should be broken down to
| smaller distinct ventures and hiring visionary leaders at
| each ventures. Like government, enterprise, Small
| Business+Startup+Open Source etc.
|
| They got incredibly lazy.
| cphoover wrote:
| 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.
| jtwaleson wrote:
| Cloud AND colocation? That's not an AWS competitor, that's a
| boring data center with some software on top of it.
| jhgb wrote:
| I thought that AWS _was_ "a boring data center with some
| software on top of it"?
| jtwaleson wrote:
| Haha, it depends on where you put the emphasis. I would say
| AWS is cloud services that happen to use data centers under
| the hood.
| hansel_der wrote:
| i wonder when cloud services will have fully migrated to
| serverless and we can finally do away with the datacenters
| once and for all.
| [deleted]
| hkh wrote:
| 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.
| mwexler wrote:
| 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.
| Hardik_Shah wrote:
| While the ambitious European cloud project "Gaia X" is unlikely
| to produce tangible results for some time, the Schwarz Group has
| created an offering under the STACKIT brand that promises
| scalable cloud solutions from the DACH region with maximum data
| sovereignty. The STACKIT cloud is still in the BETA phase, but
| the cloud service should be available soon.
| biztos wrote:
| "Together towards future-
|
| 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
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| Some of my customers in German Healthcare startups might be
| interested, they get harassed all the time for using AWS.
| TheNoxier wrote:
| At least one is already using it https://www.honic.eu
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| 2 questions: Cheaper than AWS? Managed Postgres?
|
| [Edit] Looks like yes to both.
| nik736 wrote:
| As far as I can see they don't even operate their own network and
| according to RIPE they don't own any IPs. How is this supposed to
| work?
| ArtemZ wrote:
| Copenjin wrote:
| Hetzner is more of a rival to AWS than this for now.
| wongarsu wrote:
| And this is really more positioned as a rival to Hetzner than
| to AWS, for now.
| mxxc wrote:
| the hype in terms of money they can pour here could
| potentially be a factor, as opposed to "feature completeness"
| right now.
| usrusr wrote:
| ..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)
| rr808 wrote:
| I wonder how secure AWS really is. Most people need some VPCs,
| some VMs, maybe k8s and a database all with global redundancy.
| Skills and training is almost the biggest barrier but with
| Terraform and/or some standardized APIs I'd think most mid level
| firms could switch in a month or two.
| luciusdomitius wrote:
| 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.
| pluc wrote:
| There's plenty of EU-based companies they need to challenge
| before they can challenge AWS (Hetzner, OVH, Upcloud, Raptr..)
|
| I don't see it happening, at least not with what they're
| showing.
| carstenhag wrote:
| 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
| nix23 wrote:
| >Electricity availability: 99.98% / month
|
| Ehh WHAT? That's not really usable.
| mkj wrote:
| "Get in touch" for signup does not seem like a rival to AWS.
| FlyingSnake wrote:
| Most likely they have a different enterprise sales pipeline for
| their target audience, e.g. EU Businesses.
| bayindirh wrote:
| Oracle's cloud also completes registration and provision by
| hand. Also, not everyone gets an account.
|
| If they can get a decent traction, they can scale-up step by
| step. Rome didn't got built in a day.
| WatchDog wrote:
| I've signed up for oracle cloud account and started using it
| without any hand holding.
| bayindirh wrote:
| My account provision took almost one day. Some friends'
| accounts didn't get through and got opened.
| sergiotapia wrote:
| Can I ask why you went with Oracle Cloud? It sounds very
| strange, like onboarding your employees with Blackberry
| phones.
| charcircuit wrote:
| Oracle Cloud has cheap egress. You get 10TB of free
| egress compared to AWS's 100GB and then it costs $0.0085
| per GB compared to AWS's $0.09 per GB.
|
| Edit: Oracle advertise $0.0085 as being per GB/hour, but
| it's actually just per GB.
| bayindirh wrote:
| Speedy ARM machines with plenty of resources for free.
| More than enough to play with hobby stuff and see where
| ARM is going.
| sergiotapia wrote:
| I see, I thought you were using it for business
| bayindirh wrote:
| Ha, nope. We have enough servers on prem.
| Colocation/cloud doesn't fit for our stuff (HPC) anyway.
| junon wrote:
| Very German. Tech companies here don't like open signups. I
| have absolutely no idea why. Not a single SaaS startup I've
| worked for or have worked with here has had open signups.
| trh0awayman wrote:
| I think that's because there is no real "open signup" for
| starting a company here, either. It's not like people here
| are legally allowed to try out a business before officially
| starting it - that would be highly illegal. In the US, you
| can spin up and spin down businesses the way you would an AWS
| VM.
|
| That, and Germans value contracts/stability over many other
| things - including the customers themselves.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| The contact form mentions that they're only looking to serve
| enterprise customers right now, they probably want to prevent
| small accounts from swamping the system while they're working
| on expanding their availability.
| IanCal wrote:
| > At a glance
|
| > Simple pricing models
|
| > Complete cost transparency
|
| > Verbrauchsorientierte Abrechnung
|
| Followed by "from X" pricing with zero further information.
| nunez wrote:
| I think this cloud is specific to grocery and retail, which makes
| sense. I worked with a large medical insurance chain that
| attempted to do the same thing, but for other insurers.
| m00dy wrote:
| looks like we are witnessing the moment for the future of cloud
| in europe
| luciusdomitius wrote:
| No. Because:
|
| 1) AWS has very serious regulatory capture in Europe - e.g. for
| banking, government, possibly else it is the only one approved
| solution.
|
| 2) Those pension-fund owned German enterprises are legendary
| bad at IT. The best way you could describe the culture there is
| anti-agile & anti-meritocratic.
| grnmamba wrote:
| Ovh and hetzner have existed for ages. And you can actually
| purchase services from them.
| 0des wrote:
| I've never had AWS out of nowhere threaten to terminate my
| account I've had for months unless I send them a photo of my
| passport and ID next to it.
|
| Looking at you Hetzner.
| [deleted]
| sidcool wrote:
| The title seems opinionated. Link does not have any indication of
| an AWS competition. The services are hardly close to what AWS
| offers.
| lozenge wrote:
| Nor do they appear to have actually launched.
| detaro wrote:
| 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!"
| moonchrome wrote:
| 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.
| luciusdomitius wrote:
| 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.
| pluc wrote:
| 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.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Anything that hosts anything competes with AWS in some way.
| AWS will certainly do more things than any competitor, but it
| doesn't mean it's not competing.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| If you discount the title, which is a bit click-baity and not
| actually featured on the website, this makes a bit more sense.
|
| This is one of several companies in Germany reluctant to host
| with the existing US based cloud providers. So, they decided to
| use off the shelf software (openstack probably) and stick it on
| computers in data centers that they own. That's of course not an
| alternative to AWS other than that it is a self-hosted cloud and
| as such an alternative to not self-hosting it. Nothing wrong with
| self hosting stuff. Lots of companies do that for all sorts of
| reasons. White labeling it and selling your self hosted cloud to
| others is also not that uncommon. There's an enormous long tail
| of data centers that do exactly that. Lidl is big enough that
| they probably could justify spending a little extra on hardware
| and doing a little side business with like minded German
| companies.
|
| It's a weird side effect of a lot of relatively large companies
| in Germany that are effectively family owned businesses that just
| became very large over time that don't like the idea of not being
| in control of their own assets and infrastructure. They are old
| fashioned, don't like change, and not very flexible.
|
| The added dimension here in Germany is that a lot of these
| companies have yet to modernize their IT and are relatively
| clueless on that front. Lidl would be a good example of such a
| company. And not for a lack of trying. They are the same company
| that botched their deal with SAP after spending half a billion on
| them by insisting on so many customizations that the project just
| never shipped and they pulled the plug. They want custom
| everything and they ask for stuff they think they need without
| understanding their own needs. It's a combination of
| stubbornness, arrogance and corporate stupidity. That same reflex
| is driving them to do this. They could probably have saved quite
| a bit of money by just using existing cloud services.
|
| I actually have to deal with this sentiment as we are based in
| Germany with our company. A lot of Germans are mildly
| psychotic/irrational about things in the cloud. I've met Germans
| that insist that financial service can't be hosted in AWS. Horse
| shit of course, many banks in Germany do exactly that and Amazon
| has a nice data center in Frankfurt for that. It's one of their
| main sites in Europe as it is a big market and they'll comply
| with whatever to keep that business going.
|
| Google Cloud is currently what we host on because it is good,
| cheap, and easy to use. But we have customers that don't like
| that at all and we are looking into dedicated setups for these
| customers on various German providers. They'll get the same stuff
| at a great premium that we will charge them for without any
| shame. These services are typically more expensive, harder to
| use, less reliable, and more poorly supported. There is no upside
| other than the "hosted in Germany" thing. Pay more for way less.
| Their choice but a huge PITA for our operations.
| trh0awayman wrote:
| With GDPR, it is seemingly illegal to host anything in the US,
| though (or anything with PII) - so that is one (forced) upside
| to these types of services.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| Yes, that's why Amazon, Google, and Microsoft have data
| centers in Europe that are used by European customers to
| target the European market with services that comply with all
| sorts of European rules and legislation. Including the GDPR.
| FlyingSnake wrote:
| > the title, which is a bit click-baity ...
|
| My bad, I took the title from this thread1 from 2 years ago
| which mentions that Lidl is planning to launch AWS competitor.
|
| You are correct about German companies distrusting mainstream
| cloud providers. I guess the target audience for Stackit is
| mostly those German Mittelstands. I work with German corps and
| they would definitely have a mainstream provider with someone
| reliable like Lidl as a backer. In once case we found out the
| Google Analytics is storing the data in US centers by default
| and that made a lot of people deeply unhappy. I do have doubts
| that they might fall short of delivering their goal, but it is
| indeed an interesting development.
|
| [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23151069
| fguerraz wrote:
| I'm surprised they didn't call it Silvercrest Web Services
| scoutt wrote:
| I can guess why... Everybody would recall that cheap kitchen
| appliance that broke within the first month after purchase.
| mattiasberge wrote:
| Dulani Web Services
| daneel_w wrote:
| Crusti Croc Colo.
| Keyframe wrote:
| Parkside services
| pluc wrote:
| BWS, cause if you're going for A you better be B?
| [deleted]
| pluc wrote:
| STACKIT totally sounds like a legitimate AWS rival. It says so
| right in the name!
| flipbrad wrote:
| Embarrassing "We are STACKT" typo right in the middle of the
| page, too.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| The Royal Society For Putting Things On Top of Other Things
| approves of STACKIT!
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFrdqQZ8FFc
| leberle wrote:
| oO "you can launch a VM here" is not really a "rival to AWS"
| tbh...
| eatonphil wrote:
| Is that a bigger deal than OVH or Hertzner? I'm in the US but I'm
| a big fan of OVH. Run all my development on a bare metal OVH
| server in Canada.
| grnmamba wrote:
| Right now this is just a marketing page with no way to create
| an account.
| sva_ wrote:
| Lidl, the company that wasted 500 million Euro to integrate their
| system with SAP, but failed?
| mschuster91 wrote:
| 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.
| coffeeblack wrote:
| "So now what do we do with all those programmers we hired for
| the ERP project?"
|
| "I have an idea..."
| toyg wrote:
| I seriously doubt ERP programmers can or want to be
| repurposed to web stuff.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| I'm confused. The newsworthy part is the value?
| luciusdomitius wrote:
| To be honest, Lidl is far from the only company with a failed
| billion-dollar SAP implementation. In recent years this is
| becoming the standard.
| ce4 wrote:
| 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
| jpomykala wrote:
| Electricity availability: 99.98% / month
| unfocussed_mike wrote:
| So it's a bunch of cost-effective web services, and then in the
| middle a lathe, a chainsaw and a heated towel rail?
| fullstop wrote:
| The Aisle of Shame, at least for Aldi.
| unfocussed_mike wrote:
| There was a 3D printer in the Aldi Aisle Of Shame at one
| point. Not a bad one either.
|
| Not seen a 3D printer in the "middle of Lidl" yet but I
| expect to.
| fullstop wrote:
| I have a bathroom sink faucet which came from the Aisle Of
| Shame. It's actually very nice!
| _druu wrote:
| > STACKIT is the digital brand of Schwarz IT ...
|
| 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.
| mkdirp wrote:
| > it took them over 3 months to even get any credentials for
| VPN, let alone repositories.
|
| What you're saying is, you can just join, get paid, and do
| nothing? Where do I sign up?
| _druu wrote:
| That worked for 2 weeks... Then they didn't want to pay any
| more for me waiting. So really not worth it
| jpomykala wrote:
| I also worked with people from Schwarz and some smaller company
| who manages some business data. It's going to be a disaster.
| I'm not even surprised that you need to 'Get in touch'. They do
| pretty many things manually and simply wrong. Client is
| processing large Excel file for 4 days? Somebody simply kills
| the job and the whole process starts again. Big words, cheap
| execution.
| mxxc wrote:
| i mean right now one can't even sign up properly. but obviously
| since they want to compete on a platform level as opposed to
| whatever you were doing for them, surely "not being able to
| create an account" isn't gonna draw users away from gcp/aws.
| andrew_eit wrote:
| "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 _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.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Customers have hunger for German copy-writing!
| FabHK wrote:
| Ze money goes into ze technologie, nicht into ze marketing,
| jawohl!
| twoneurons wrote:
| Being international minded and being an anglosphere slave are
| completely orthogonal vectors
| makerdiety wrote:
| No, you did the right thing by ranting. You both shared some
| knowledge about contemporary German commerce with us and gave
| the company some constructive feedback for its marketing
| website. You're on to something here.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| You are probably right, but on the other hand, correct English
| or not, anyone who cares will read "blah, blah, blah, skip,
| skip, skip, where are the actual specs?".
| ho_schi wrote:
| Yes! The usual corporate websites are worthless and don't
| present information. Every non-profit, club, or community
| provides a humble but clear website with the required
| information and menu! Look at that bloated visual rich
| websites: www.ibm.com
| www.siemens.de www.salesforce.com
|
| What is wrong? The "About" must be at the top, the things you
| provide must be linked with some words at the top or left.
| They put their images, much Java-Script, and useless stuff
| across the homepage.
|
| The English wording? A minor problem. I'm thankful that
| Andrew explains what is wrong and how to fix it! As a German,
| I'm annoyed by Germans who use every chance to tell other
| people that their English is much better (than mine).
| OskarS wrote:
| Yeah, that was my issue as well. Grammar aside, that sentence
| is so full of corporate-speak as to be virtually meaningless.
| It might as well just be in German.
| webjunkie wrote:
| I feel like the other way around it's also pretty bad, if not
| worse. Technical things written in, or translated to, German
| sound so boring and stiff that you want to immediately run
| away.
| doppioandante wrote:
| As a student of both German and English, this mistake looks
| weird to me, as you are supposed to start the question with the
| verb in German (Brauchst du ...?), and this acts as a pretty
| good reminder to translate the question with the do in English.
| dmurray wrote:
| Agreed, as a poor student of German, I'd say "Brauchst
| du...?" is correct and your German 101 teacher will mark you
| down for anything else. "Du brauchst...?" is informal, and OK
| in advertising copy, but "You need...?" in English is an even
| lower, more informal register than that.
| tpush wrote:
| Putting the verb second is pretty common in German
| advertisement, not really unusual.
| FabHK wrote:
| Agreed, it strikes me not as particularly German bad English,
| but generic bad English. One sees that particular bad
| construction all the time.
| alisonatwork wrote:
| This goes beyond a nitpick into reactionaryism, in my opinion.
|
| I am a native English speaker who has lived and worked in many
| countries around the world. In some of those countries English
| was the primary language, in others it was formalized in the
| workplace as the business language, in others it was just a
| lingua franca used by immigrants and expats of many different
| backgrounds to communicate with one another. One of the best
| things about English is that it easily adapts to all these
| roles. It's a flexible language, and there are many different
| ways to express the same thing. I believe that's one of the
| reasons why it is so popular as a second language.
|
| English as it is spoken in the professional sphere in Germany
| is different to the English as it is spoken in the professional
| sphere in the US or Canada or England or Australia, and that's
| fine. Ditto India, Singapore, Philippines, South Africa...
| Unlike Spanish, French, Chinese etc there is no central
| regulator that defines how the English language is supposed to
| be used. Grammar can change depending on where you are. English
| speakers all over the world essentially understand one another,
| despite using different structures and idioms.
|
| While it is true that completely bastardized grammar can become
| more difficult to understand, and may result in the language
| being spoken getting classified more as a pidgin or creole, I
| don't think it's especially helpful to "nitpick" over this
| particular issue - a sentence structure that is easily
| understandable by anyone in the world who can speak English. If
| "do" gets dropped by English language speakers in the context
| of questions, what's the big deal? Especially in written
| language where we use a question mark anyway. Who cares?
| unfocussed_mike wrote:
| Right.
|
| I really recommend "Oxford English: a guide to the language"
| by Ian Dear. It is/was published by Oxford University Press
| but if you look around on eBay, Abebooks, amazon secondhand
| etc., you can often find a very cheap "IBM Edition" -- they
| co-published it along with a dictionary of quotations
| (presumably they helped compile the latter).
|
| It's a really fantastic volume that goes into such detail
| about Indian Standard English, for example, that it will make
| you love English even more.
| tokai wrote:
| You are talking up an 'international mindset', but what you are
| writing here goes against that. They are not writing native
| english. They are writing ESL. A true international mindset is
| accepting that the english the people of the world write to
| each other is not the same english as british people speak.
|
| Would you also have corrected it if had been text written by
| Nigerians or others that use a creole or dialect of english?
| throwaway4good wrote:
| The copy is fine; English does not need to written by native
| speakers - that is a completely distorted definition of
| "international mindset".
| signal11 wrote:
| There's also the cookie prompt (yes, headline in capitals)
|
| > BEFORE GOING ANY FURTHER: BRIEFLY ABOUT THE PROCESSING OF
| YOUR DATA
|
| But... that said, as someone who's only done a bit of German on
| Duolingo, I don't mind, especially for early-stage services. It
| says to me more work needs to be done around l10n and
| copywriting, but as long as they keep improving the core
| product, it's okay.
|
| In fact what annoys me more than awkward English are teams that
| download and use generic English-language website templates,
| resulting in super-generic product pages.
| trentnix wrote:
| Nothing odd about it. You pointed out a lack of attention to
| detail. I'm guessing one will find other areas of their product
| that show a similar lack of detail and attention.
| m2fkxy wrote:
| > (...) these little details would go a long way to actually
| showing that the German economy does have some sort of
| international mindset (...)
|
| Well, I think that Germany's commercial balance shows this much
| better than non-native-sounding-yet-fully-correct grammar.
| croes wrote:
| >you can immediately tell if a person is a native German
| speaker because they don't capitalize the first letter in an
| English email
|
| Pretty bold claim. I bet there are many other languages where
| the first letter after the salutation isn't capitalized.
|
| I also bet that some native english speakers make the same
| error.
| throwawaymanbot wrote:
| wdroz wrote:
| > 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).
|
| TIL thanks.
|
| Sadly once you are in the professional world, nobody correct
| you anymore, so you can't improve/fix your English easily.
| EE84M3i wrote:
| Normally I wouldn't, but seeing as your post is about being
| corrected in English, I'll correct you.
|
| >nobody correct you anymore
|
| Should be "nobody _corrects_ you anymore "
| andrew_eit wrote:
| What you say is write and I am guilty of that too. I would
| feel very rude or out of place telling a colleague of mine to
| capitalize the first letter after Dear X. Even if I wanted
| to. So I just write my reply correctly and hope they notice
| :)
| wdroz wrote:
| You are right, I do that too :) It's a bit passive
| aggressive but more acceptable in professional settings.
| jdrc wrote:
| You have probably not experienced i18n of american websites
| 2143 wrote:
| I totally empathize.
|
| When American websites are translated to other languages,
| sometimes some things end up weird.
|
| By the way, I feel Indians speak that way in _casual_
| conversations; "you want coffee?", "you want biscuit?" etc.
| andrew_eit wrote:
| This doesn't bother me at all, especially at an individual
| level.
|
| I want to make clear - it's not the language issue per se. I
| think native English speakers are incredibly privileged to
| have their language as one of if not the international
| language, so I could never fault a person for not speaking a
| foreign language well (I'm sure I butcher the German language
| in ways that would make Goethe himself cry out in anguish).
|
| It's the fact that this is an international company launching
| a product in a professional setting. Again, I don't quite
| know why this bothers me so much, but I feel its within the
| context of other cultural things I experience.
| specialist wrote:
| > _STOP translating directly from German_
|
| Is this an option in German business culture? Are Germans open
| to conveying the (mere) gist of a sentence?
|
| Ages ago, we translated our manufacturing software to German.
| Our German team were an absolute joy to work with. They were so
| thorough, they'd correct our English, and then translate to
| German. In other words, our German translators caught mistakes
| missed by our own technical writers. So awesome.
|
| I'm not sure the reverse is even possible, culturally. Can a
| German marketing and PR firm accept a localized version of
| their message? Off the top of my head, I can't think of a
| German lifestyle product or consumer brand. And the German
| brands I do know -- BMW, Mercedes, Kraftwerk -- don't much use
| words for marketing. They don't need to.
| yobbo wrote:
| > I can't think of a German lifestyle product or consumer
| brand
|
| NIVEA, Braun, Miele, Bosch, Birkenstock, various chocolates
| ... and so on. Lots of marketing in awkward English.
| specialist wrote:
| Heh. True.
|
| Let me try again...
|
| Bullshit is hard to translate. Culturally, German branding
| may have comparatively less bullshit. And therefore less
| compulsion to translate nuance. Just describe what the
| product does.
|
| Amazon recruiting will say stuff like "code ninjas needed
| to invent future!" Versus "get beaten like a rented mule
| for two years, to make Bezos even more rich, then fall over
| dead". (How would one translate either version?)
|
| This LIDL/Schwartz pitch, perfectly normal for America,
| comes off kinda weird, like maybe satire, from a German
| company.
| ant6n wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Except it doesn't.
| Hermel wrote:
| > international mindset
|
| The international mindset is to be tolerant with non-native
| speakers. I find it perfectly ok when a German company uses
| expressions that hint at their origin. Similarly, I'm not
| bothered when a British company uses British words or a Texas
| company uses expressions that are typical for their region.
|
| What triggers me, however, is when people misspell expressions
| in ways that reveal that they have no clue about where the
| expression comes from. For example, if someone tries to sound
| smart by using the latin expression "per se" but actually
| spells it "per say", that reveals to me that they are probably
| not as educated as they want to appear.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > if someone tries to sound smart by using the latin
| expression "per se" but actually spells it "per say", that
| reveals to me that they are probably not as educated as they
| want to appear.
|
| That's a nice eggcorn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eggcorn
| madoublet wrote:
| Do they intend to attract US interest? When I see a country
| specific TLD, I automatically assume that the company is
| focused on a specific region.
| gruez wrote:
| > 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>"
|
| I don't get it, which part is supposed to be capitalized,
| "dear" or "we"? As a native English speaker the sentence looks
| correct as it's written. Or maybe I have bad attention to
| detail.
| andrew_eit wrote:
| "Dear Ms. Smith,
|
| We would like to inform you..."
|
| vs
|
| " Dear Ms. Smith,
|
| we would like to inform you..."
| gruez wrote:
| Thanks. I haven't been taught this rule but my brain seems
| to associate the capitalization requirement with the
| newline rather than the salutation itself.
| biztos wrote:
| But if you write it on one line, the capitalization of We
| is definitely wrong.
|
| However you can always tell your correspondent is German by
| their capitalization of second-person pronouns! Also the
| awkward use of "kind regards" because they can sense that
| "with friendly greetings" doesn't sound right.
|
| "Dear Ms. Smith, we would like to inform You that Your
| cloud subscription will soon be expiring. Please send Your
| payment by registered letter to..... Kind Regards, Dieter"
| ;-)
| FabHK wrote:
| Mail in iOS capitalises it automatically, which drives me
| nuts when writing in German. (Look, it's not a new
| sentence, why should I capitalise it?)
| gruez wrote:
| My logic/rationalization is that even though there's no
| period after the "Dear,\n", the newline makes it a
| separate paragraph and therefore a separate sentence.
| cestith wrote:
| Both. The greeting is a separate entity and despite ending in
| a comma or semicolon is not part of the first sentence of the
| body of the email. This is inherited from English standards
| for writing letters on actual paper. Unless it's being graded
| for a class in school, is part of some official
| communication, or is going to a copy editor, though, it
| probably doesn't actually bother anyone if this convention is
| flouted.
| hermannj314 wrote:
| What if customers that are extremely sensitive to grammar rules
| end up being very expensive customers to keep happy? Filtering
| them out on the front end might be a great business move.
|
| I imagine something like "Our customer support is being
| overworked by completely banal minutiae, what can we do?" We
| compare different intake funnels, and customers that were
| presented with a badly translated homepage never reach to
| support with such issues. Let's make sure to always run that
| page from now on, those customers aren't worth the hassle. Make
| sure they stick with AWS and bleed them dry.
| themdonuts wrote:
| I absolutely loved this comment. I feel total empathy not
| specifically with the topic, but for how you feel. I moved back
| to my home country (not DE) after 10years abroad and oh man,
| those thoughts are constantly with me. I'm doing an effort to
| readapt and hope it works well.
| andrew_eit wrote:
| This is the comment I was waiting for :) It's strange isn't
| it, to suddenly be negatively receptive to something that you
| never noticed bothered you in the past.
| RicoElectrico wrote:
| I think you're onto something. So often, Germans _think_ they
| know English and don 't bother to have a native speaker proof-
| read their copy.
| trh0awayman wrote:
| I understand where you're coming from - that companies of this
| size should be able to afford native English translators,
| especially if they're internationally facing.
|
| But I think that most people (in the international business
| community) don't notice the details your talking about, so in
| the end, it really doesn't make sense to pay for a translator.
| I live in Germany, and even my most brilliant German friends
| (with basically native English skills) cannot grasp the subtle
| differences of when to use "this", "that", or "it" (as in,
| "this one time at band camp" vs "that one time at band camp",
| "it's awesome" vs "that's awesome" vs "this is awesome"). It's
| a dead give away, but almost nobody would ever know except
| native speakers.
| bilekas wrote:
| I'll nitpick further and say that the grammar is actually
| perfectly valid.. You don't believe me ?
| mabbo wrote:
| There are the valid grammar rules and there is the way people
| of the language actually speak. The unspoken rules.
|
| If I can read the text and guess what language the original
| text was in, I would argue that it's not a very good
| translation.
| moffkalast wrote:
| If there are unspoken rules that can't be defined then
| they're not rules, they're made up bullshit.
| mabbo wrote:
| They can be defined, but nobody does so explicitly.
| Consider the classic example of the order of adjectives.
|
| You can have a big brown bag, but if you have a brown big
| bag, something sounds wrong. You can have an excellent
| blueberry muffin, but not a blueberry excellent muffin.
| You can meet your 27-year-old Ukrainian friend, but not
| your Ukrainian 27-year-old friend.
|
| Unless you majored in linguistics or learned English as a
| second language, you probably never once even thought
| about the rules of adjective order in English (and in
| other languages the rules are often different!). But you
| know them, follow them, and people who don't follow them
| don't sound right to native English speakers.
|
| And there are _so many_ weird rules like this.
| moffkalast wrote:
| I knew you were gonna mention this one and I don't think
| it really qualifies as it's not really an unspoken rule,
| it's the pretty well known and strictly defined adjective
| ranking order.
| ShroudedNight wrote:
| English: Shibboleths _all_ the way down.
| gmac wrote:
| Even if it's technically grammatical, I don't think it's
| something a native speaker would generally write or say.
|
| "You need X?" works in a casual setting. But IMHO it looks
| pretty out of place in a more formal sentence like this with
| so many fancy nouns.
| bilekas wrote:
| It could definitely be reworded to be at least easier to
| follow. I guess this is where Spanish is useful with the
| inverted question mark. ?
| cormacrelf wrote:
| It is perfectly valid indeed. This person's main complaint is
| that Germans, who have enough English in their society that
| that one might even expect dialects to form, are not putting
| enough effort into disguising themselves as native English
| speakers. I'd call it 50/50 that the people who built this
| product speak English at work.
|
| This is like ranting about Microsoft's website using American
| spelling when clearly they're selling to British people as
| well, only worse. This is pretty short-sighted. To OC, please
| keep thoughts like this to yourself. I hope you're not doing
| this for all the different stylistic usages of English out
| there, otherwise things are not looking good for literally
| any Australian business.
| jsty wrote:
| This sort of "feels wrong" non-native yet grammatically
| correct use of language is precisely the kind of thing that
| would be fine on an internal doc where comprehension is the
| name of the game, but falls flat on its face on external
| communications where a more fuzzy "trust" is trying to be
| engendered.
|
| Or to put it more abruptly - if the release marketing is so
| low effort they haven't even bothered to get a professional
| translation, it suggests the same care and attention may have
| been lavished on the product.
| toyg wrote:
| How would I know this is Lidl? It's not in the references, which
| are underwhelming. From the site, this is no different from
| dozens of other consultancy-oriented cloud providers.
| mlatu wrote:
| it says so at the bottom of the page:
|
| "The Schwarz Group consists of the well-known brands Lidl and
| Kaufland, as well as Schwarz Produktion and waste and recycling
| management companies."
| johnfarrelldev wrote:
| > The Schwarz Group covers the entire value chain of the food
| trade like no other trading company, from production to sales
| to materials management. Digitalization and its pressure to
| change are noticeable in all business areas. To continue to
| successfully serve rising customer needs, new digital business
| models must be iterated even faster - and this while the data
| and system infrastructure becomes increasingly complex. As the
| number 1 in the European retail business, the Schwarz Group
| knows that those who do not digitize will lose market share in
| the long term.
|
| Lidl are part of the Schwarz Group.
| jacquesm wrote:
| "STACKIT is the digital brand of Schwarz IT and therefore part
| of the IT organisation of one of the world's largest retail
| groups. The Schwarz Group consists of the well-known brands
| Lidl and Kaufland, as well as Schwarz Produktion and waste and
| recycling management companies."
| mtmail wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwarz_Gruppe is the parent of
| Lidl. And the Schwarz IT business group runs StackIT. There is
| also Schwarz Mobility for fleet management of company cars. I
| don't think it's meant to be associated with the Lidl brand.
| jacquesm wrote:
| 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:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lidl#Working_conditions_and_la...
| throwaway4good wrote:
| Whereas I hear the pay at the Amazon fulfillment centers is
| really good???!
| [deleted]
| lnxg33k1 wrote:
| Yeah I was also a bit confused about that, like few months
| ago 2 employee had to die during a storm just because Jeff
| Pesos couldn't afford to keep a fulfillment center closed and
| people still work at AWS without conscience issues?
| jacquesm wrote:
| Yes, that must be why Amazon works hard to ensure their
| employees don't unionize.
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/16/technology/amazon-
| unions-...
|
| Who needs collective bargaining power if the pay is so great.
| jakelazaroff wrote:
| GP is being sarcastic.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Then GP should learn to use the /s tag.
| TuringTest wrote:
| The multiple '???!' should be enough of a hint (as well
| as the obvious context of contradicting reality)
| jacquesm wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law
|
| Witness the number of people that 'didn't get it' and
| realize that I am not at all surprised that some people
| would write something like that and mean it, superfluous
| punctuation or not.
| rb666 wrote:
| Adding /s would still leave plenty people to take it
| serious. We don't have to cater to the 100%.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Fair enough, but that is the convention.
| 0des wrote:
| mtmail wrote:
| They have 150 employees. Like Amazon there's likely a
| difference how people at the frontline vs backend IT systems
| are treated.
| oblio wrote:
| AWS has 40k employees, so that's going to be interesting.
| coffeeblack wrote:
| Is there any evidence for that other than the scandal they had
| a decade or so ago? Maybe I missed it.
| jacquesm wrote:
| 'The scandal'?
|
| They've had a whole series of scandals, it is one of the
| worst employers in Europe and some of the stuff they do is
| just incredible. Some of them are more pressworthy than
| others but Lidl never really stopped.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lidl#Working_conditions_and_la.
| ..
| coffeeblack wrote:
| Sorry, but those are all "accusations" or "claims", and
| almost all refer to misconduct of management in one
| particular warehouse or shop. Not comparable to the spying
| scandal from a decade ago.
| jacquesm wrote:
| It's the same company.
|
| Of course misconduct of management would happen 'in one
| particular warehouse or shop', where else would it
| happen? Lidl consists of corporate, warehouses and shops.
| Most opportunities for abuse will be present in the
| latter two.
|
| As for the spying scandal: the same board that condoned
| that still runs the company today, they conveniently
| scape-goated one individual and threw him under the bus
| but just like other scandals involving multi-nationals
| the real perps typically stay out of the firing line.
|
| Lidl paid a 1.5 million euro fine, which is a pittance
| and their exec a nice golden parachute, who by the way
| now has a nice little thing going as a high flying
| consultant:
|
| https://de.linkedin.com/in/frankmichaelmros
| kristaps wrote:
| > Lidl has a long history of underpaying and abusing their
| personnel
|
| So does Amazon?
| amelius wrote:
| Underpayment and abuse might turn out to be the key to
| success. /s
| 88840-8855 wrote:
| No idea what you are talking about. Here in Germany Corporate
| Lidl is paying fair, retail management on entry level is being
| paid way above average and even the retail employees are paid
| above competition (on the same level of Aldi).
|
| Those traditional companies will never be able to compete with
| absurd FAANG salaries (that are obscene in my opinion anyway,
| but that is not the topic) due to the nature of the business.
| If this thing scales, however, then salaries could be higher.
|
| Finally, I am living in Germany, I have worked for German
| companies. Many of us dont like the US, we dont like those
| American services, too. If there was a German alternative, even
| with a premium, we would pay that. It has to be competetive in
| functionality, but not necassarily in price.
| throwaway4good wrote:
| Yes! Something like this would be very suited for public
| sector work.
| MarcusE1W wrote:
| At least in the UK they are well known to pay well above
| average in the retail industry.
|
| https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-59306232
| jacquesm wrote:
| That was mostly because they couldn't recruit staff, the free
| market at work. But when faced with the option to squeeze
| people and push them beyond human endurance Lidl will do it
| _every time_. Employees have killed themselves because of the
| work pressure there.
| tut-urut-utut wrote:
| > But when faced with the option to squeeze people and push
| them beyond human endurance Lidl will do it every time.
|
| Do you really think Lidl will be able to mistreat the IT
| stuff, given the current market shortage in Germany?
| locallost wrote:
| Sounds like the right company to take on Amazon.
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| I seem to remember one person in France (?) but it could be
| Renault or some other French company, so I might remember
| wrongly. Are there others?
|
| [Edit] After some googling, yes there was one in France for
| Lidl, and three for Renault, and three for France Telecom
| (and more). Is it that other countries do not relate
| suicides to work (but they exist) or is there something
| special about France?
|
| (never worked for Lidl, or in France and only shop at Lidl
| if needed, I don't like their products very much)
| jacquesm wrote:
| Two confirmed cases, and one case where they encouraged
| employees to kill themselves (I'm not kidding):
|
| https://www.francebleu.fr/infos/societe/lidl-vise-par-
| une-qu... (in French)
|
| "Blackmail, pressure, favouritism, bullying,
| sequestration in an office, incitement to suicide and
| intimidation: the accusations made are edifying, the
| testimonies surprising. The management of another time."
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| Thanks! :-(
| nonick wrote:
| Same in Romania, biggest salaries in the industry.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > I think they'll have a hard time finding people to staff
| that, Lidl has a long history of underpaying and abusing their
| personnel
|
| Their store staff yes indeed, but they won't be able to get
| away with that for IT staff. The situation is similar to
| Amazon... those who are essentially disposable cogs get treated
| as such as far as the law allows (and in some cases even
| worse), the ones who can't be replaced get paid really well.
| paganel wrote:
| Over here in Romania Lidl pays some of the best salaries in the
| retail market, the worst are the likes of Carrefour, Cora and I
| think Auchan, too. They also have an IT division in here, not
| sure what their relative pay is.
|
| A close friend of mine works for the local Lidl division, she
| is part of the team that does internal communication and as
| such she has been directly involved in "marketing"
| compensation-related stuff and related perks to the company's
| employees and such. To me it does seem that Lidl, the company,
| tries to treat its employees as humanly as possible, which is
| saying something when it comes to the retail market.
| jacquesm wrote:
| There is a major difference between how they treat
| 'corporate' employees vs how they treat store workers.
| paganel wrote:
| The internal communication I was mentioning about was/is
| meant at store workers.
| mkdirp wrote:
| > I think they'll have a hard time finding people to staff
| that, Lidl has a long history of underpaying and abusing their
| personnel
|
| I don't know about the personnel abuse, but here in the UK Lidl
| employees are one of the better paid employees as far as
| groceries stores go.
|
| EDIT: maybe I was thinking of Aldi, who, after a quick search,
| seems to pay significantly more than Lidl.
| dreen wrote:
| You are correct. Lidl pays their staff more than any other UK
| supermarket. But this might not be the case in other
| countries, plus doesn't mean they don't abuse their staff in
| other ways.
|
| Source: friend who was a market researcher for Tesco
| lloydatkinson wrote:
| "underpaying and abusing their personnel"
|
| Amazon has the same...
| cudder wrote:
| Really? This is contrary to what I've heard from friends who've
| worked at Lidl. Admittedly my sample size is just 3 and all
| local to Finland, but over here Lidl seems to be regarded as a
| good employer, and when you factor in the various bonuses, they
| pay well above market rate.
| saiya-jin wrote:
| don't mind him, he is on some personal vendetta against that
| company, other comments here show that clearly
| jacquesm wrote:
| > he is on some personal vendetta against that company
|
| I'm on a personal vendetta against any company that abuses
| its employees. Lidl, Amazon, and others besides, consider
| me an 'equal opportunity employer' when it comes to abusive
| employers.
|
| Also, your comment is well outside the HN guidelines.
| ceva wrote:
| AWS is a direct competitor in retail market it's common for big
| companies not to chose AWS if they are in same business, with
| Microsoft Azure it's a bit different story as they are the IT
| company not like Amazon.
| netfortius wrote:
| There's no comparison to the modern slavery happening at Amazon
| or Walmart.
| dijit wrote:
| Lidl are a big employer and I'm sure they're not perfect: I
| don't like the "others are worse" metric for arguing but
| unfortunately Lidl are consistently one of the better chains so
| it's hard to buy this.
|
| It's also true that Amazon is consistently the _worst_ employer
| in all areas including their AWS staff, where they are worried
| about (and I quote) "Burning through all competent human
| capital"[0] in certain parts of the world.
|
| With those two factors (Lidl being above the baseline, amazon
| being below): your comment seems like FUD.
|
| [0]: https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-warehouse-turnover-
| wo...
| jacquesm wrote:
| > your comment seems like FUD
|
| And your comment reads as though 'AWS is worse' is a defense
| of Lidl. It should be possible to do right by your employees,
| not to see who can get away with the most harm without being
| outright liable.
|
| 'Little' things like asking your female employees that are on
| their period to wear colored headbands to be allowed toilet
| privileges or employees committing suicide due to work
| pressure does not fall in 'not perfect', that's outright
| hostile.
|
| See provided reference.
| saiya-jin wrote:
| Well you seem to desire attacking Lidl no matter the facts
| or experiences, so don't be surprised at other's reactions.
|
| Lidl is generally cheap store (but there are exceptions
| when they provide above above-average q, but where I come
| from, people are generally happy to work there and they
| sure pay above average within business.
| saiya-jin wrote:
| Well you seem to desire attacking Lidl no matter the facts
| or experiences, so don't be surprised at other's reactions.
|
| Lidl is generally cheap store (there are exceptions when
| they provide above above-average quality for little price),
| but where I come from, people are generally happy to work
| there and they sure pay above average within business.
| dijit wrote:
| AWS is worse is absolutely a defence of Lidl.
|
| The "problem" here is that it's being positioned as a
| dichotomy between the status quo (Amazon) and an entrant
| (Lidl) and your claims that Lidl are "bad and I won't use
| them" implies that you would use Amazon. Since that's what
| is in the topic.
|
| Not saying they're perfect, as mentioned, all I know is
| that they're a big employer and externally: they pay better
| than the competition and have a much higher employee
| satisfaction rating (where I can see it) than for instance
| ASDA, Walmart or Swedish chains like Coop and Netto.
| jacquesm wrote:
| I won't use Amazon either. The title references this as
| an AWS competitor and if you read my comment carefully
| you would probably realize that I did not exactly glorify
| them, rather the opposite.
| jstummbillig wrote:
| > I think they'll have a hard time finding people to staff
| that, Lidl has a long history of underpaying and abusing their
| personn
|
| Not sure what branch you are refering to, but that's definitely
| not the case with their IT department. Their pay and benefits
| are well above market rate.
| carstenhag wrote:
| Pay is ok, working hours are not ok. In 2019 I was offered a
| 42h contract (Uberstunden abgeholten) which I of course
| declined. Almost 0 mobile working possibilities back then.
| That changed with Corona, but it tells a good picture imo.
| tut-urut-utut wrote:
| Funny you say that and pick up Amazon as an example. Lidl is
| known for not treating retail workers the best, but still
| orders of magnitude better than Amazon treats their retail
| workers.
|
| That being said, both are irrelevant, since it won't be the
| first company that treats retails workers like shit, while
| handling the IT workers like spoiled rock stars.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Amazon is referenced in the title...
| jmillikin wrote:
| > 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.
| MrBuddyCasino wrote:
| I bet their "internal customers" is mostly their bottom of the
| barrel kaufland.de marketplace.
| carstenhag wrote:
| You don't think the entire schwarz group would need
| databases, network stuff, VMs etc? The Kaufland marketplace
| for taken over from Real.
| aeyes wrote:
| This product looks like it doesn't respect the license of
| Elastic: https://www.stackit.de/en/product/elasticsearch
| FlyingSnake wrote:
| This was discussed 2 years ago on HN and had some interesting
| comments and insights from insiders1
|
| [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23151069
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