Azure Server

1

Hi all.

Hope everyone is well.

Has anybody successfully spun up a Openhab server on Azure?

What is possible and what is not possible?

Thanks

2

I’ve never done it and I can’t imagine why someone would do so. There are always use cases I’ve not considered though.

So what is not possible?

  • It won’t be able to discover or connect to any of your devices on your LAN.
  • It won’t be able to connect to any of your physical hardware (e.g. USB dongles, serial cables, etc.).

What is possible?

  • Connecting to any device whose integration with OH is through a cloud based API.

Given the whole point of OH is to control devices in your home, it would be a very limiting to run it in a cloud server. Furthermore, many OH users want to get away from reliance on cloud services so hosting OH itself in the cloud goes against that goal.

Furthermore, openHAB really should not be nakedly exposed to the Internet. At a minimum it should be behind a reverse proxy with some more strict authentication and authorization. By default (though it can be changed) OH will allow access to your MainUI Pages to anyone who accesses the page without any authentication at all.

However, if you want more control over things, it does make a lot of sense to host your own instance of the openHAB Cloud Server on a VPS or on Azure or AWS or whatever. You won’t really get more functionality over what is offered by myopenhab.org, but it will be nominally in your control.

3

Thank you very much for the reply. All make good sense.

May I please ask one more question.

What if you looking at server level integration within the same cloud environment. Prologic server(Lighting), Niagara server(BMS), Victor server(CCTV). Somfy server(Blinds)? Can you harvest the endpoints out of the cloud?

Just a thought. (I really need sleep - LOL)

4

If they can see and connect to each other. It’s all based on networking I would imagine. But not all home automation technologies are based on standard TCP/IP networking.

And, as I hinted at, you’ll have to go out of your way to secure it.

5

Thank you Rich.

6

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