A major outage at Amazon Web Services this morning left millions of people with broken home automation devices: door locks, heating, lights, ovens, even doorbells.
Don’t let your home automation system be dependent on external services!
I always keep two principles (or rules) in mind when building my own systems.
Rule #1: No external dependencies.
Rule #2: Mechanical overrides.
I also don’t like to leave remote internet access to chance. Best to get your own SSL certificate and DNS entry. StartSSL and DuckDNS are great for hobbyists.
And also be sure to have a tight firewall, forwarding only specific protocols on specific ports from specific machines.