12 Server Use Cases That Don’t Require Excessive Time and Effort

Key takeaways

• Deploying apps and building server environments has traditionally been a time-consuming process, involving numerous small tasks.  
• The Hivelocity App Store offers 30+ applications that can be deployed automatically, often within 15 minutes.  
• You can quickly create anything from a business intelligence stack or developer platform to a security layer or gaming infrastructure. 

When you buy a server, you gain potential. The server provides compute, storage, and network resources. But it’s up to you to make those resources useful.  
 
That process of turning hardware into something useful typically involves numerous steps. To deploy a single application, you might need to read through documentation, run an installer, deal with dependencies, configure the app, and implement security settings. And of course, you’ll probably conduct at least one search for an error message that somebody else encountered years ago. 

Meanwhile, you have colleagues who are ready and waiting to use the app.  

The Hivelocity App Store was created to streamline the previously time-consuming, manual process of app deployment. Available through the myVelocity infrastructure management tool, the App Store lets you choose from more than 30 popular applications and deploy them automatically on your server, often in about 15 minutes.  
 
So, instead of thinking about how to deploy a particular app, you can focus on addressing higher-level technical or business needs. Here are 12 ideas of what you could do with the apps available through the App Store. 

1. Build a BI Stack

Business intelligence (BI) can get expensive surprisingly quickly. If your team wants data exploration and dashboard capabilities, without the expense of a commercial BI platform, you can explore open-source options available through the App Store. 
 
For example, you can choose Apache Superset to build sophisticated visualizations and dashboards. Add Metabase to enable less-technical users to ask questions of business data and turn answers into dashboards. Implement ClickHouse to provide the high-speed columnar database layer for teams crunching enormous volumes of analytical or event data. Together, these three applications provide a strong foundation for a self-hosted analytics environment. 

2. Give Developers Their Own Private Heroku

The appeal of Heroku, a cloud-based Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering, is simple: It allows developers to accelerate the process of moving apps into production. You could achieve a similar benefit by deploying applications from the App Store on your own server. 
 
For example, Coolify enables developers to deploy applications and databases through a self-hosted platform that is not tied to a proprietary cloud. For a more minimal approach, you can use Dokku, which puts the git-push deployment experience on your own server using Docker. Either way, you make it easier for developers to deploy apps without giving up infrastructure control.

3. Construct an Observability Wall for Engineers

What engineering team wouldn’t want a giant screen full of graphs that show infrastructure health and application performance? You can build that observability wall with software available in the App Store.  
 
Grafana and Prometheus provide the basis for metrics collection and visualization. The ELK Stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana) creates a centralized system for collecting, searching, and visualizing what is happening across your environment. 

4. Construct a Private Collaboration Cloud

Some organizations are content using Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) tools to store internal files and messages. But you might decide to keep your collaboration tools in a private environment. 
 
You can deploy Mattermost to implement a self-hosted team messaging environment similar to Slack. And you can add Nextcloud to bring together file storage, file sharing, and collaboration in an environment you operate yourself. Together, these tools enable you to gain greater control over internal communication and collaboration data.

5. Create a DevOps Headquarters

Your DevOps team might want greater ownership of the development and deployment toolchain than a typical source repository can provide. Using apps from the Hivelocity App Store, you can create a DevOps headquarters where code, issues, and deployments all live together. 

Use GitLab CE to combine Git repositories, issue tracking, and continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) into a self-hosted DevOps platform. If you pair it with Docker, your team can standardize how applications are packaged and moved from a developer’s machine into production. Adding NGINX or HAProxy simplifies application routing and traffic distribution.  
 

6. Assemble an Application Platform

If your developers are moving toward containers, microservices, or edge deployments, you can use your server to build an application platform.  
 
For example, you can use Docker to package an application and its dependencies together in a container, helping ensure that the software runs the same way on every machine. If your team needs to orchestrate microservices applications, you can choose MicroK8s, which provides a lightweight Kubernetes distribution suited to smaller and edge environments. You can then deploy NGINX to handle web traffic and HAProxy to distribute traffic across multiple systems. 

7. Implement Storage That Speaks S3 

Object storage has become one of the basic building blocks of modern applications. Organizations use it for everything from media content and application assets to backups, archives, and logs. Of course, your organization might want to implement object storage without keeping every object in a hyperscale environment. 
 
Garage provides an alternative to the public cloud, offering self-hosted, S3-compatible object storage running on infrastructure you control. Your team can stick with the S3 model without resorting to a hyperscale environment.

8. Add Another Security Layer 

Maybe you want to turn your server into an additional layer of security. For example, you might decide to ramp up defenses against web application threats, credential stuffing, or distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. 

You could deploy CrowdSec to augment existing protection with intrusion detection and IP blocking. CrowdSec uses community-generated threat intelligence to identify and block malicious behavior. 

9. Streamline Website Administration

If your company has just one website, manual administration might be manageable. But if you manage numerous sites for your company or your clients, you need tools that can help you enhance the efficiency of administrative tasks.  

Implementing CloudPanel gives you a simple, lightweight control panel for managing websites, databases, and SSL certificates. You could then deploy NGINX for the high-performance web serving and reverse proxy capabilities needed for modern sites and APIs.  
 

10. Provide the Backend for a Multiplayer Game 

Let’s say your company is developing a new multiplayer game. You might already have infrastructure selected for running the game, but what about the backend? You need an environment to manage accounts, provide chat capabilities, and store leaderboards. Deploy Nakama, an open-source server, to handle those backend capabilities.  
 
Or maybe you just want to give employees a way to relax and build camaraderie. In that case, you could deploy Minecraft. 

11. Enable Real-Time Communications

Whether you want to livestream events, foster collaboration with your hybrid workforce, or deliver telehealth services, you might decide to use your server for real-time communications. Creating that environment can be challenging, especially if your developers are building the real-time media layer from scratch.  

With the App Store, you can start with LiveKit, an open-source platform and developer framework for real-time audio, video, and data streaming. Developers can then build a custom app on top of LiveKit. 

12. Run JavaScript Applications

Not every deployment needs to be a massive undertaking. Maybe your team developed a simple application and needs a place to run it. With the App Store, you can deploy Node.js, an open-source runtime environment, to run the core code. You can then add NGINX to act as a web server, reverse proxy, and load balancer, if needed.  
 

Starting Closer to the Finish Line 

Building a usable environment on a server can involve numerous time-consuming tasks. The Hivelocity App Store was designed to eliminate many of those tasks, enabling you to start closer to the finish line. You can implement a new environment—and start using your server—much faster than before.  
 
What you build on that server is, of course, up to you. But with the App Store, you have a wide range of possibilities just a few clicks away. 
 
Learn more about myVelocity and what it can do for your team. 

FAQ

Q: What is the problem with traditional application deployment? 
A: Traditional application deployment requires numerous time-consuming tasks, such as running installers, handling software dependencies, configuring the application, and implementing security. Business teams, developers, and engineers often need to wait hours or days before they can start using a new application.   

Q: How does the Hivelocity App Store speed application deployment? 
A: The Hivelocity App Store, available through the myVelocity infrastructure management tool, offers more than 30 applications that can be deployed automatically, often in less than 15 minutes. For many applications, security rules and hardening are incorporated into the deployment. As a result, new apps and environments can be ready to use much faster than before.   

Q: What kinds of environments can we deploy with apps from the App Store? 
A: The software available from the Hivelocity App Store enables you to build multi-application environments for business intelligence, infrastructure monitoring, DevOps, object storage, real-time communications, backend gaming functions, and more.