Drone Operations

What this stack is

Drone Operations Stack is the self-hosted alternative to DroneDeploy, Pix4D Cloud, and Skyebrowse for drone service providers, inspection teams, and aerial mapping firms. One-click deploys mission file storage (Nextcloud), a geotagged media library with EXIF/GPS browsing (Immich), S3-compatible storage for huge 4K/8K video files (MinIO), time-series telemetry ingestion (InfluxDB + Grafana), and AI-powered vision analysis on captured frames (Open WebUI + Ollama).

Where cloud drone platforms charge per processed map and lock your flight logs behind US-hosted SaaS, this stack puts everything — footage, telemetry, mission plans, AI analysis — on infrastructure the drone operator controls. Critical when inspection clients sign NDAs, when public-safety teams have data-handling rules, or when EU operators face EASA + national civil aviation data residency requirements.

What it's for

• Aerial inspection — power lines, wind turbines, bridges, industrial facilities: footage stays under inspection-client NDA
• Photogrammetry & mapping — accumulating thousands of geotagged stills per flight, processed offline
• Construction progress tracking — weekly aerial flights, comparison over time, AI-assisted change detection
• Real estate & architecture — branded client galleries with watermarked deliverables
• Search & rescue — public-safety teams logging flight paths, evidence chain-of-custody, AI-assisted person/object detection on footage
• Agricultural surveying — multispectral imagery archives, NDVI analysis history, AI crop-condition tagging
• Drone training schools — student flight log archives, instructor review, performance trends

Who it's for

• Drone service providers with steady-revenue inspection/mapping contracts (5-50 monthly flights)
• Construction firms running their own drone fleets for progress documentation
• Agricultural drone operators offering precision-farming services
• Public-safety units (police, fire, S&R) needing evidence-grade footage chain-of-custody
• Independent professional drone pilots building a long-term portfolio + client deliverable system
• Drone training schools managing student flight archives at scale
• Inspection consultancies delivering reports to industrial clients with strict NDA + data residency clauses

Apps in this stack

Sizing & deployment

• Recommended VPS: 14 GB RAM, 6 vCPU, 500 GB NVMe storage (storage-heavy; QGIS Server adds ~2 GB RAM baseline)
• GPU optional — useful for batch AI tagging of large image sets; not required for storage/telemetry/GIS workflows
• Storage scales aggressively: a single 30-min 4K drone flight ≈ 25-40 GB; mapping mission with 1000 RAW stills ≈ 20-50 GB; orthomosaics generated by OpenDroneMap (roadmap) add 5-15 GB per mission
• Object storage offload strongly recommended: MinIO can mount external block volumes (Hetzner Volume / S3-compatible) for cold archive
• QGIS project files stored at /opt/qgis/projects/. Upload from QGIS Desktop via SFTP/rsync — same workflow drone pilots already use for mission plans
• Deploy time: ~25-30 min one-click, all SSL automatic via Let's Encrypt
• Backup profile: nightly Nextcloud + Immich library + InfluxDB dump + Grafana dashboards + QGIS projects directory

Why hosters sell this

The drone services market is growing 20-25% annually and is dramatically under-served by mainstream cloud. The existing SaaS options have three killer problems for professional operators:

1. Per-flight or per-acre pricing that makes ROI math hostile at scale
2. US-cloud data residency that breaks inspection NDAs and public-safety chain-of-custody requirements
3. Locked ecosystem — your flight logs and footage live in their database, vendor lock-in by design

This stack solves all three at flat-rate VPS pricing. The hoster sells to a vertical that's both price-aware (they hate per-flight bills) and price-tolerant for compliance (inspection clients pay for sovereignty).

Common resale shape:

• Solo pilot tier — single VPS, single user, personal mission archive + AI tagging
• Small operator tier — 2-5 pilots, shared mission library, telemetry dashboards, client deliverable portals
• Inspection company tier — multi-tenant client isolation, white-label client portals, dedicated infra
• Public-safety tier — air-gapped variant, audit log, evidence chain-of-custody documentation

Stack retail pricing is set by the hoster based on their cost stack (VPS + storage + Bluix license + sector-specific operational overhead). See the suggested retail hint on this page as a starting anchor.

Roadmap apps (planned catalog additions)

These would deepen the stack's coverage of the drone vertical. Not in catalog yet — would be added in a focused expansion if customer demand confirms the segment:

• OpenDroneMap (ODM) — photogrammetry: stitches drone photos into orthomosaics, 3D point clouds, DEMs. The big missing piece vs Pix4D. Outputs flow naturally into QGIS Server for web-publishing
• Mosquitto MQTT + Node-RED — live telemetry ingestion during flights (current stack supports post-flight log import via InfluxDB; live-streaming would be incremental)
• Drone-specific log parsers — ArduPilot log files (.bin), DJI flight records (.dat), PX4 logs (.ulog)
• GeoServer — alternative to QGIS Server for organizations that prefer the GeoServer ecosystem (some inspection clients standardize on it)

If you (the hoster) confirm demand for this vertical, these are low-effort catalog additions and would unlock a v2 "Drone Operations Pro" tier with full photogrammetry pipeline.

Compliance profile

• All footage and flight logs stay on the VPS — critical for inspection clients with NDAs, public-safety chain-of-custody, EU operators under EASA Art. 11
• Audit log of every footage access + every AI analysis query + every login, with user identity, timestamp, IP
• Deploy region picked at provisioning for national civil aviation data rules (EU, US, AU, BR each have different requirements)
• Watermarked client deliverables — Nextcloud + Immich support per-album branding for branded client portals
• Right-to-be-forgotten for clients who terminate contracts (delete their Nextcloud folder + Immich album + InfluxDB tagged data = full removal)
• Air-gap variant available for public-safety / government deployments (no internet egress, manual updates only)