Recent outage

Devices & Integrations
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Hi Everyone,

There’s been a push for the development of EDGE devices, devices running solely on the hub so that in the event of an outage that home automation would not be interrupted.

There was a recent outage that affected a great many people. For me, this outage only affected local devices - zwave and zigbee devices. My question is, how was this SmartThings outage able to affect my local devices, and how is EDGE any different?

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That’s not what Edge is: did you see that in an official statement somewhere?

“edge”: comes from an industry term, “edge computing,” which means something that sits at the intersection between cloud and local. More local. Not fully local.

Just as an example, in the new architecture the SmartThings app is still completely cloud dependent. No Internet connection, no app operations. (Technically, they didn’t have to do it that way: Apple’s HomeKit app works just fine without an active Internet connection as long as it’s on the same local Wi-Fi as their hub. But that’s not how Samsung is designing their platform.)

Here’s the official visual representation of the new architecture. Note the app in the upper right.

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Remember that over 90% of smartthings customers at this point don’t have a hub at all. They have a Samsung smart television or smart appliance, all of which are cloud dependent anyway.

There are also some other functions like mode and timers which still run in the cloud.

So without the Internet, some pre-created routines will be able to still run. But not all. More than before, so that’s good.

What the official announcements have promised is

improved reliability and reduced latency

Also:

With the launch of SmartThings Edge, we are taking some events that would have happened in the Cloud and moving them to the SmartThings Hub.

But not total independence from the cloud.

The hub also does some frequent housekeeping in its communications to the cloud, and when the cloud isn’t just unavailable, but rather flaky, like it was earlier this week, there’s no telling exactly how the hub will respond. :thinking:

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