Empower Your Creativity: 5 Surprising Things Users Built with Underground Nexus

Most classroom lab environments are vendor-locked-in, license-heavy, and built for IT from ten years ago. Underground Nexus flips that model.

It’s a self-hosted, browser-accessible system where users can run production-grade tools, build secure cloud stacks, and take ownership of their infrastructure from day one. No vendor contracts. No bloat. Just real-world infrastructure that runs on almost anything—even a borrowed Chromebook.

Educators use it to deliver hands-on training. Students use it to create, experiment, and deploy real projects with real stakes.

Here are five unexpected things people have built with their Nexus environments. You won’t find these in a standard lab setup.

1. A Hip-Hop Channel… with a Live Security Operations Center?!

One of our standout students, Kristopher Ballard, built HipHop Soc, a livestreamed YouTube channel that fuses lo-fi hip-hop beats with real-time cybersecurity monitoring using BitDefender.

Yes, you read that right.

With Underground Nexus, Kristopher isolated workloads, deployed BitDefender inside a secure cloud lab, and streamed it all live from a SOC he built himself. It’s part education, part vibe, and completely his own.

2. A Fully Remote Podcast Studio, Powered by Nexus

When CEO Laura Riley decided to start a podcast to showcase her friend's experiences with bariatric surgery and extreme weightloss, she didn’t use GarageBand or an agency. They used the Underground Nexus.

Inside a Nexus Creator Vault, Laura set up a production suite with OBS Studio, KDenLive, and professional-grade audio tools. The result? A fully self-hosted workflow for recording, editing, and producing episodes—all from a browser-accessible platform.

3. DNS Management: The Project That Sparked a Pivot

One of the very first things we did during the early development of Underground Nexus was build a DNS threat-management tool called the Olympiad using PiHole on a Raspberry Pi. But during the COVID-era chip shortage, Raspberry Pis became almost impossible to source.

That scarcity forced us to pivot, eventually evolving into the cloud-native platform that is Underground Nexus today.

Of course, when we built the Nexus, we made sure PiHole would be compatible. Students now deploy it inside their Nexus environments to learn DNS, networking, and container security, all while zapping every annoying ad off their devices.

4. Smart Homes in the Browser

Yes, you can build a smart home in the cloud. One of our students did just that using HomeAssistant inside the Underground Nexus.

Did you know that HomeAssistant can manage your entire office, from locks, lighting, and IoT automations. And it's open-source.

They connected IoT devices, built custom dashboards, and created automations for lights, locks, and alerts—all from a Nexus stack they could access anywhere.

For students in networking or automation tracks, this is hands-on gold.

5. Teaching Their Own Curriculum!

One of the most powerful Nexus deployments we’ve seen came from a student who used the pre-installed BookStack knowledge base inside their environment.

Not only did they use it to document what they were learning, they also created and shared an entire training curriculum, turning their Nexus into a self-hosted LMS. They were able to offer their training to other students, and the original author evolved into a peer instructor inside the lab environment they built.

This is what we mean by ownership: the freedom to not just learn, but lead.

What Will Your Students Build?

None of these projects came from a rigid syllabus. They came from learners who had room to explore and infrastructure that didn’t hold them back.

That’s what Underground Nexus is built for. Want to learn how? Join Cloud Jam!

It’s our free, guided program that helps you launch your own Underground Nexus environment, test out core tools, and see how it fits into your curriculum or use case. You’ll go from zero to deployed with support from people who’ve done this before.

If you're ready to stop duct-taping lab environments together and give your students something better, join Cloud Jam. Let them build, break, and ship something real.

We’ll be watching for the next HipHop SOC.