When contemplating my network topology, an inevitable question I had to ask myself was how much I wanted to rely on cloud computing and SaaS features to get the most out of all the technology I incorporated in my home. Initially, I attempted to go the convenient route with third-party solutions that relied on AWS servers to create and host my automations. However, I quickly realized that outages tend to be more common when sticking solely to cloud services, which can ultimately render automations temporarily useless. For example, relying on a third-party motion sensor to make requests to servers in a nearby city for turning on a single lightbulb was not a robust solution. The response time could be slow, or at worst, the automation might misfire and not function at all.

Therefore, to maximize availability and reliability, I decided to make a hybrid setup to allow both remote access and connectivity to my cloud-enabled IoT devices, while hosting the rest of my automation features securely in my home. This was also a great opportunity to learn YAML, a simple mark-up language that is heavily utilized in the tech industry. Ansible, for instance, uses YAML in its playbooks to easily automate tasks for corporations on a daily basis. Home Assistant also comes with integrations and add-ons that can extend that functionality and automate tasks through other means, like Node-Red.