Linus Tech Tips Discussion

 Eight Sleep mattress doesn't work without AWS, and don't expect to sleep if it's offline... Summary Apparently Eight Sleep uses AWS for their cloud service, and the large outage on Monday caused their services to go down (1). Unfortunately that meant for some users that the cooling stopped working (2) or their bed apparently couldn't be adjusted anymore (3) https://www.golem.de/news/durch-aws-ausfall-smarte-matratzenauflagen-rauben-nutzern-den-schlaf-2510-201413.html (German)   Quotes Quote Translation from article: An outage at the cloud provider AWS (Amazon Web Services) on Monday had far-reaching effects on countless online services. Eight Sleep, a manufacturer of smart mattress toppers, was also affected. The toppers are supposed to improve sleep quality. However, during the AWS outage, the opposite happened for many users. Original: Ein Ausfall beim Cloudanbieter AWS (Amazon Web Services) hatte am Montag weitreichende Auswirkungen auf unzählige Dienste im Netz. Auch das Unternehmen Eight Sleep, ein Hersteller smarter Matratzenauflagen, war betroffen. Eigentlich sollen die Auflagen die Schlafqualität verbessern. Während des AWS-Ausfalls passierte jedoch bei vielen Anwendern das Gegenteil davon.     My thoughts I know LTT dropped them for sponsoring and called out their issues with the subscription models before, but since they where features I figured this would be something that they might touch on during the WAN show. This just shows again how bad any 'smart' device is that doesn't have at least a minimal functionality when offline. People keep thinking the internet is always there and that the cloud is always there. But our infrastructure is a lot less resilient than people think. A simple small mistake can lead to massive outages that have much farther reaches than one imagines. Even if your service doesn't run on <insert your large cloud provider of choice> there's a good chance that a service you are using is using them. I get it, a smart home is fun and can really help you, but make sure it stays active even without the internet, and without the support from the vendor.     Sources (1) (2) (3)