Unifi absolutely has flaws and missing parts that are easy to run into if you push into more powerful aspects of networking, but overall it's a delightful foundation, and critically to me was the feature of zero online dependencies. I feel like that's the Net at its best, a smooth progression from your own random kit all the way up to multi region failover hosting or whatever but purely based on bandwidth/uptime/maintenance/cost considerations, never any permanent ties. Can centralize/decentralize/move around/selfhost/colo/contract out at will. Unifi can match where you're comfortable with, is has pleasant pretty safe defaults, and they're great about long term updates and support. At the end of the day I can forgive a lot over that, particularly given the contrast it is with so many other offerings.
That's also a good point, the reliability is solid and things won't fall apart even without a controller. That said the controller is necessary for certain nice extras like stats, guest portal, etc. Granted the average HN crowd may have other appliances or systems to manage that, and plenty of people do use a controller locally installed on a notebook purely to adopt and setup APs and then never worry about it again, but given how cheap the minimal VM needed would be or Ubiquiti's local "cloudkey" (worst name ever, has nothing to do with the cloud, it's just a stick computer dedicated for this), I think it's worth considering having a controller running if someone was going that way anyway. Might as well have the management console up all the time. My only point was that running it is highly, highly flexible.
UniFi Cloud Controller
$299.00/year for up to 10 devices
$498.00/year for up to 20 devices
$697.00/year for up to 30 devices
+ $199.00/year per 10 additional devices
When I include my time, one less things to break or be misconfigured, one less vendor involved, etc... $299+ a year is worth it vs $120 a year + AWS/Azure, but if youre trying to do it on the cheap, I agree with you.
Does the Unifi mobile app work with the setup you described?
You can easily control 50 to 100 ubnt APs on the cpu, ram and disk resources of a $10/month VM. Big difference between like $700-900/year and $120/year.
However I am more in favor of having the unifi controller on the same premises as the APs, or at least in the same metro area network as the APs, in your own private network. Just throwing the L3 management option out there for people who truly want 'cloud' hosted everything.
But when your premise is MANY sites across the country, and you are using a single controller, only ONE site gets the controller on prem, OR you have many controllers running.
>Big difference between like $700-900/year and $120/year.
At the end of the day, it comes down to what my time is worth doing other things (not how much im paid, but the opportunity cost of me managing management interface infrastructure, stability, and resources. Unifi cloud, for lack of a better phrase, just works.)
yes, totally agree, in that sort of scenario with many premises you would set up your own internal L3 management of the APs, in your own management VRF, in RFC1918 IP space.
Or if you happen to have your own hardware on premises a unifi controller on debian can be a really small Xen VM that runs at an average load of 0.02, your xen or KVM hypervisor can be as small as an Intel NUC stuck to a plywood board on the wall of a telecom room in the building.