Once again AWS was down for a number of hours. And the posts started to fly. ‘Amazon’s massive AWS outage points to a key weakness in modern Internet’ and ‘Inside the Amazon AWS Outage; How one failure rippled across the global economy’. These have become rather common place now, and it seems that not many really pay attention to it. And, since this web site is about home automation this is where I want to talk about this.

One of the key tenants to a equipped smart home is having everything local. This way, if the Internet goes out, your house will keep working. And, by adding a UPS (uninterruptible power supply) you could even make a smart home that will keep working during a power outage. But more importantly, imagine when you can’t do simple tasks such as turning lights on and off because the Internet is out or some cloud service has gone down..

But, it’s more than just that. When you hand everything over to some ‘cloud’ provider (in this case Amazon and AWS) this means you have no control over what happens to your smart home during an outage. And often, you have no control over your data as well. But, by running Home Assistant and keeping everything local you can also keep all of your data local as well. Seems smart, doesn’t it?

Let’s run through some actual, real world effects of this.

1. A major Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage on October 20 had the unexpected side effect of causing chaos in bedrooms across the US, as owners of Eight Sleep’s $2,000+ ‘Pod’ mattress covers found their smart beds had no offline mode and were stuck at high temperatures and odd positions in the night.