eight sleep with a brand new way to get burned by cloud based IOT ![]()
Them sh*tting the, um, bed with terrible engineering practice and PR presenting it as “third party outage affected our users” seems pretty unoriginal actually
Considering critical failure modes seems important. And losing Internet connectivity is a pretty obvious one!
For some of those interested in the details of the AWS outage last week - See: Summary of the Amazon DynamoDB Service Disruption in the Northern Virginia (US-EAST-1) Region
Basically it was a DNS update race condition, that "took down" DynamoDB, which then impacted EC2 instance starts (as they need to update an internal DynamoDB around the instance state), which then impacted NLBs - Basically, the house of cards was built up with alot of internal usage of DynamoDB.
Lots of changes, and very interesting in sort of the scaling issues they have to deal with, in that they just aren't running BIND like the rest of the world - Rather they have their own DNS planner and multiple "DHS Updaters" that apparently run concurrently, and in this case - stepped on one another.
Moral of the story, distributed, concurrent systems are hard to fully debug at scale, and have lots of subtle interactions when things go wrong. It made me feel better about my trials and tribulations debugging multiple RM invocations, PB usage, etc.
It slightly reminded me of the 1990 AT&T outage - But that propogated across various phone centers, and took out 70% of the nation's long distance phone network: How one line of code caused a $60 million loss & PART ONE: Crashing the System </HEAD>

I know it's spooky season, but that's too frightening!! LOL. Worse, I live about a mile from that data center...
My Ecobee with 6 temp sensors paired to the HA and than to HE via HADB. Everything is 100% local and works perfectly fine for years.
Yea. I actually have that as well, but the functionality is kind of limited. Homekit supports the basic functions of a thermostat, but the Ecobee can do allot more. For that reason i still use Ecobee Suites and a few of its helper apps.
Agree. But my interruction with Ecobee Tstat and Temp/Motion sensors is very simple.
For the Tstat all what I need - is to turn it On/Off based on Doors/Windows opened/closed status. I can set Tstat Mode and Temp. But I am in South Florida and somebody always at home. Therefore there is no need to change a mode (it is always Cooling) and to adjust Temp. Sensors are used by Tstat itself for balancing temperature and for presense detection. There a few RM Rules for controllin Flair Vents (these are midified for 100% local control by replacing existing control boards with ZEN53) and controling Ceiling Fans. All together all these toys are keepig very well balanced temp across the enire apartment.
And YES, no any clouds are involved. Everything is 100% under local control.
