For contrast, service providers like Hetzner (also a German company) let you provision cloud instances with a single click, and you can SSH into them immediately.
I have a few pet projects running as docker swarm stacks in Hetzner nodes, and the time it takes between provisioning instances from scratch and get everything installed, configured, up and running and serving production traffic with an Ansible playbook is measured in seconds.
In StackIT it takes longer to get your phonecall picked up by someone.
Nevertheless, this is an excellent step in the right direction. If the cloud is renting other people's computers, it makes no sense at all that there are so few people renting their own hardware (specially within the EU), and the ones that do charge a hefty premium.
From the homepage it took me 7 clicks to drill-down into information about a specific compute service and see pricing, and it leads to their generic contact form page: https://www.stackit.de/en/contact
They're really missing that these big digital movements / transformations typically start out as a single person investigating / fiddling around with the service on some trial account or with a $10 provisioning spend as part of a few hours long Jira ticket on a Friday afternoon.
By inserting humans in the middle of this process (and the delay and back-and-forth which is incurred from having to formally give all that company information and implementation planning information and have it vetted) they're going to turn off a really significant number of potentially lucrative clients who will go elsewhere because they don't have to mess around with humans until they're sure of what they want.
7 clicks? I count a single click to basic prices and two clicks to full pdf pricelist?
https://www.stackit.de/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/220601_STA...
Outside of that, it's just the Deutsche Banks, Daimlers, Bosches and Bayers of the world.
And those are in general much more rigid than the equivalent US companies.
Which in the field of software is suicide. There's a reason we call it "software".
Not sure what are their IT needs, but I guess the larger SMEs are the target market for this service.
I'd argue that SMEs are the ideal market for cloud services.
Small shops with even smaller teams comprised of jack-of-all-trades are willing to pay a hefty premium for managed services that allow their teams for get things done without having to do everything themselves.
Once your company grows beyond the definition of a SME, its able to roll their own infrastructure and do their thing in more cost-effective ways that don't involve handing over their core business to external and even foreign companies.
Eventually the few devs left get "sold" to the contracting company, with the architects left as management for the contractors.
Have seen this happening already several times since 2007.
(disclaimer, worked as a contractor)
Usually it boils down to escalations where management gets some goodies from the offshore agency and then everything is good again, from management point of view, naturally.
Everything wrong with EU/German tech industry and why it will never catch up to the US, in a nutshell basically.
How many of the startups you have in mind didn't switch their infra once they grew? I know not a single one.
Calling Stackit an "AWS competitor" is most likely just editorialization by the 3rd party media.
The target customer are companies which are just barely moving away from self-hosted hardware.
On top of obvious reason everybody knows damn too well - any US 3-letter agency doesn't give a nanofraction of a f*k about privacy and will use any data to gain any advantage, and specifically treats non US-citizens as subhumans when it comes to several human rights. Geolocation is only theoretical guarantee when stakes are so high.
Some are OK with that, some are not.
Those providers usually strictly target the B2B sector, with a focus on small to medium companies which only now start to do "digitalization". They usually still run with old-fashioned IT departments and certainly no budget to hire a full DevOps department with experienced senior developers.
For that reason, the German providers usually don't focus on scale and automation as the support burden is rather high. Hosting in Germany, and being compliant by default with many data protection rules is a big plus for inexperienced customers. But I imagine, this also leads to high customer retention due to de-facto lock-in.
Note that the article says that they are using a "proprietary" cloud platform. In my experience, in Germany "Cloud" is still a very ill-defined marketing term. It might well be possible that the "Cloud" just means that you can use a WYSIWYG interface to provision Linux VM templates (see for example the IONOS "Data Center Designer").
I had to look at the "Stackit" homepage itself to confirm that they are indeed hosting a Kubernetes based PaaS. But they indeed seem to focus on dynamic VM-Hosting and even colocation. They even mention SAP hosting!
In the past, United Internet, Deutsche Telekom and some others had a hosted e-mail offering branded as "Internet made in Germany" for similar reasons.
Another company of the "Internet made in Germany" group is Strato. They started with website and shop builders, and now make a lot of money essentially offering hosted Owncloud/Seafile services. Usually those are also marketed as a "Cloud" offering.
This makes me shudder just thinking about this, knowing how bad internet in Germany is, falling behind countries like Romania and Ukraine by several leagues.
Back in 2010 when I used to live in Berlin we found it almost fun and cute how there was bad internet, poor mobile coverage, and no credit cards accepted.
It was fun to return in 2020 and experience the exact same thing again
It's pretty maddening sometimes, I'd write emails that include everything they might need to know, yet they insist on calling back just to read the emails and confirm every point.
Like... why?
https://www.stackit.de/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/220601_STA...
I got to it via top menu -> prices -> scroll down a fair amount -> "to the price list" (in a yellow box)
It's linked from here: https://www.stackit.de/en/prices
In order to access the really competitive pricing (to running the cloud yourself) on AWS, you have to do the same. As in, many of the bigger AWS users have deals with Amazon to get sometimes massive reductions in price, but they are custom negotiated between humans, not something you'd find on a website. The smaller AWS customers, those using the public prices, pay way more than what the service is worth.
instead of `aws ec2 run-instances` and 1000 other APIs that AWS expose, it looks like lidl just have `lidl contact-sales`
Maybe latter on this thing will do AWS-style provisioning and services, but right now that doesn't even seem to be a current goal.
>They claim they are the German AWS
I see some media claim their are that, but it doesn't look like they themselves make that claim.
Let's see what happens in 6-12 months.
Wouldn't be surprised if you have to fax in a request for a new instance.
Aws was spun out from a successful large scale online retailer. What are lidl thinking?
In the US they have an online catalog and even in/out of stock indicators for your store. Lidl is now my preferred grocer outside for standard items while I use higher end grocers primary for their meat departments that have better cuts of meat available. Their produce is great although if you need a speciality item you likely won't find it. Their bakery is top notch compared to most US store bakeries.
They've always offered household items but I've noticed this expanding at my local store beyond toiletries and disposables, things like clothes and what not. I can't say I ever considered buying power tools or anything I'd want to keep and use long term there (I tend not to go discount for such items and opt for higher quality). There are places like Home Depot close and accessible enough here in the US that I doubt most would buy such products there. They do offer some plants on the cheap, although I'm not a plant person.
That bullshit caused us a huge amount of headaches when we wanted to deploy our COVID systems to Azure...
Once you have the encrypted data somewhere, and if you really need to, it's just a game of time. At some point the old encryption will be broken.
They claim they are the German AWS when they miss the first thing that Bezos did at Amazon. He removed the barrier of entry to the max. He realized that people do impulse buying and the easier it is to do this the more business you get. Does anyone remember 1-click? I am sure a I have quit out of a purchase a hundred or more times at random vendors when I ended up having to create an account to just find out how much shipping is.
I had to order some custom laser cut metal parts. There are hundreds of companies offering this in Switzerland but almost all require a call for quote. The one company that let me upload my Fusion 360 file and give me an instant quote is the one I went with even if it cost more because I don't have the time to write 10 companies and send each one of them a CAD file having to explain what I want for such a limited run.