OpenHAB and Moteino?

[WhiteHare]

Consider something like Amazon Echo.  I got one when they first came out, and it's fantastic.  Right now, it *only* exists in the cloud.  It has gotten markedly better since it first came out, and I haven't had to do *anything* for that to happen.  In fact, I could have been in a coma for the last six months, and it would have improved just the same without me.  Now, would I want to have my own copy of Echo on a server at home in case my access paths to the internet go down?  Well, sure, if it wouldn't be too costly, but at the moment I don't feel a strong need for that.  Someone else might draw their line between what's critical and what isn't somewhere differently, and so it goes.  I'm not trying to argue that everything should be in the cloud, but at the same time I wouldn't be surprised if some of it is. 

[Edit: I'm using Echo to illustrate, in part because it's such an obvious fit for home automation.  Prototyping  on virtual machines in the cloud before reducing it down to a home footprint might also make a lot of sense, at least as a bridge when first setting things up.  It really just depends on what's available, and where.  Who knows?  This whole category is starting to thaw and become fluid.  I'm grateful for whatever improvements may emerge, and to that end, I'm just trying to stay flexible and open to whatever points of leverage I can find.]

[syrinxtech]

Great points @WhiteHare.  Kudos for Amazon to be able to pull off automatic updates on that scale without screwing things up.  A family member has the Wink hub and during one automatic update something went south and the unit stopped functioning.  The Wink folks had to manually come into every box that was disabled and fix things.  Updates on that scale would make me very nervous if the devices were critical to my well-being.

I'm OK with the cloud for certain things and others not so much.  Much of it comes down to implementation and management of the networks/security.  It certainly isn't a panacea or magic bullet.  Give it a year or two and the replacement for the cloud will be here.  Well, probably not a replacement per se, but certainly the next phase that we as consumers certainly won't be able to to live without.