100 million light commands per day: Hue reveals details from the cloud

If you are interested in the technical background and cloud connectivity of Philips Hue, then this blog post from Google will certainly be of interest to you. In it, the Philips Hue manufacturer, together with Google, explains some of the background to cloud connectivity.

Since 2015, Philips Hue has been using the cloud container infrastructure Kubernetes, an open-source system from Google. In 2016, the system carried out 200 million transactions per day, including 18 million light commands via the cloud. Just under a decade later, 3.5 billion transactions are carried out with the cloud every day, including 100 million light commands. The response time of the system has always been particularly important.

Response times must not be too long

“In the world of connected lighting, a response time reduced to a few hundred milliseconds radically changes the user perception,” says Leon Bouwmeester, Director of Engineering and Head of the Hue platform at Signify. “A latency of three seconds is enough to break the illusion of fluidity and gives the impression that the system is slow, even faulty. In other words, for us, responsiveness is not a luxury: it’s a fundamental requirement.”

Most of us have probably given little thought to what goes on behind the scenes at Philips Hue. As far as the cloud connection is concerned, however, the article that has now been published gives you at least a glimpse of the highly complex infrastructures behind the whole thing. And in the coming years, data transfer with the cloud will certainly not decrease, thanks to the introduction of the AI assistant, which is already available in the first countries. Let’s see when we will be able to join in outside the Benelux countries…