The application platform deploys an app without you building a server for it. You point it at your code, a Docker image or a ready-made template; LayerOne builds it, runs it in its own virtual machine, and keeps it running. You are billed for the resources it actually uses, by the hour.
It is a different product from a virtual server. A server hands you root and you install everything yourself. An application is managed: you give it a source and some settings, and the platform owns the build, the runtime and the restarts.
Find it in the client portal under Application platform, which has three tabs: Applications, Databases, and Cloud Firewalls.
Source, build, release, deploy
An application moves through four things, the same shape as other app platforms:
| Term | What it is |
|---|---|
| Source | Your code or image: a GitHub repo, a Git URL, a Docker image, or a template |
| Build | Turning a version of the source into something runnable |
| Release | A build frozen together with the configuration in force at the time |
| Deployment | Making a release the running copy |
Because a release freezes its configuration, a rollback is just deploying an older release, and it brings that release's settings back with it.
Applications are private
An application has no public address of its own. It runs on a private network and is reached from the internet only by putting a Cloud Firewall in front of it. Its pages show it as Private, reached through a Cloud Firewall. See Make an application reachable from the internet.
One instance per application
Each application runs as a single instance in its own guest. There is no replica count to scale out and no built-in load balancing across copies. You size that one instance under Configure your application, and you make it bigger by giving it more CPU, memory or disk, not more copies.
What you can deploy
- A web app or service built from your code, from GitHub or a Git URL.
- A Docker image from Docker Hub, see Deploy a Docker image.
- A ready-made template such as Nextcloud or code-server, see Deploy from a template.
Projects
Applications live in projects. Apps in the same project share a private network and can reach each other by name; apps in different projects cannot. Every account has one default project, and that is enough until you want to separate environments. Managed databases belong to a project too, which is how an app and its database find each other.