I have recently seen a couple of videos about running home assistant on a virtual machine and it got me wondering, is it possible to install hass.io on a virtual machine that isn’t stationed in your house/on your wifi, for instance through Google cloud or AWS?
Since Google cloud offers 300 dollars free i thought it could be a nice way for new people to test out Home assistant before buying a raspberry or something else to run it on.
But then how would you use it to control things IN your home?
I don’t know a whole lot about all of this stuff hence the question 
But i was thinking that someone in here might, i thought that it might be possible to connect that virtual machine to your wifi in some way, but i’m only speculating.
Well, the discovery process relies on being on the same network as your devices.
It would be a massive learning curve to get connected to your home network…at that point you might as well test it out with a VM on your own desktop.
Home Assistant is one of the few Smart Home platforms hat does NOT depend on the cloud to function.
In many other systems if their server is inaccessible or your Internet is down, there is no local control.
Correct me if i’m wrong, but isn’t your Home Assistant inaccessible as well if your internet is down?
And this is just an assumption, but i would think that VM’s hosted by Google or Amazon would be very consistent.
I get that some people prefere to have their things locally, but there are also some who doesn’t care.
I already have a raspberry pi running home assistant, so it wouldn’t benefit me a whole lot, but for helping others i thought it could be a good thing, apparently not 
Consider yourself corrected. 
My Home Assistant runs on a Raspberry Pi locally. If my Internet were down, my Alexa devices would fail to work my my Z-Wave devices would work fine. If I had any Zigbee devices they should continue to work too. Zigbee functionality may be device/platform specific.
Of course, my HA would not get weather updates but they are not critical to operation…
Local processing was one of the reasons I am trying HA, The only others I know of are:
OpenHAB - updates every 6 months and is in the middle of a 2 year (and counting) platform migration mess.
Vera - requires their hardware. The old non-zwave plus platform was OK but people with the newer version are tending to move th HA and use their Vera hardware as just a z-wave plus hub.
Possibly Hubitat
Actually this is pretty interesting. I’m also looking at it because I admin all my relative’s IT needs. So it would be easier for me to buy a shared subscription to i.e AWS and run several instances of HASS virtual machines each on their own port and just giving them their respective address and login. I think I would setup a vpn or dns for each one of them.
Would be easier to manage or troubleshoot for me, than to have to forward ports on their routers, and remember their particular address, port, passwords, etc
I had been thinking of a solution following the same lines when reading this question. AWS EC2 with a vpn connecting the home network is a brilliant idea. An instance with the requirements to run HA is on their free tier so could come in as a cost free solution too.
Hello @scottstuff I wonder if you have implemented this idea and if you was able to discover your local devices through a VPN.