Built Under Fire

Andy Potanin founded UDX in 2011 after serving with 2nd Reconnaissance Battalion, USMC as the communications and technology specialist supporting special operations teams, including Navy SEALs. His job was keeping comms alive in environments designed to kill them: contested frequencies, degraded networks, zero margin for downtime. After the Marines, he worked as a systems engineer at Northrop Grumman, then completed the UNC Kenan-Flagler Executive MBA.

The conviction was simple: web platforms should be built the way defense systems are built. Assume failure. Automate recovery. Audit everything. That philosophy attracted a team of engineers, designers, and strategists who have spent the last 14 years proving it works at scale across industries that don't tolerate downtime.

Cloud Hopping is the natural endpoint of that operating model. The same principles that kept reconnaissance communications alive in contested environments — frequency hopping, crypto rollovers, dynamic redeployment — now keep enterprise infrastructure running across clouds. The difference is that UDX has 14 years of production evidence that these principles work outside the military, at enterprise scale, under real operational pressure.

Everything in a repository. Every deployment automated and reversible. Every decision documented. We published the approach as Deploying with Impunity — our engineering paper on building systems that survive infrastructure failures.