After years of enabling warfighting missions, Defense Unicorns is proud to announce that UDS Core has reached version 1.0!
UDS Core is the backbone of mission environments across DOW service branches, solving some of the most difficult IT problems to get software capabilities into the hands of warfighters. It’s the foundation of our secure, portable, airgap-native UDS platform, which we purpose-built to make installing and updating software on military systems fast and easy.
What does reaching “version 1.0” mean? This engineering nomenclature is called “semantic versioning,” and it’s, well… semantic! And, somewhat subjective.
UDS Core crossing the 1.0 threshold indicates that breaking changes to UDS Core (like switching from NeuVector to Falco) will be much less frequent. However, our engineers will continue to improve UDS Core, and if major changes are needed in the future, the major version will be incremented accordingly.
Declaring “1.0” does not mean that UDS Core was immature up to this point. Quite the contrary! Defense Unicorns has been using UDS Core in production systems for years, and as of this blog post, we support over 50 mission systems, almost 300 applications, and nearly 100,000 mission users.
To celebrate this engineering milestone, let’s take a quick journey back in time to see how UDS Core came into existence…
Unicorn Origins
Starting around 2017, several revolutionary software programs were born within the DoD. The founders of Defense Unicorns helped birth organizations like Kessel Run, Platform One, and Space CAMP, to name a few.
Jeff McCoy, co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of Defense Unicorns, is credited with building much of the technology behind these organizations. At the end of his tenure in government positions, he left having learned an important lesson that the DOW is now running with full steam ahead: The government cannot compete with the speed and talent of the commercial industry, especially when solving repeatable problems.
Through its early years, Defense Unicorns iterated on the success of Platform One by contributing to its Big Bang platform and spinning off our own “Defense Unicorns Big Bang Distro,” which we dubbed “DUBBD.” Ultimately, by leveraging the speed of commercial development, the talent of the open source community, and backed with venture capital funding, Defense Unicorns built a new and better platform: Unicorn Delivery Service (UDS).
UDS is an ecosystem of software delivery capabilities built on the open source foundation of UDS Core, which we’re celebrating today. UDS Core took evolutionary steps in platform capabilities by using one of our open source projects, Pepr, which serves as a Kubernetes operator to automate and simplify the most difficult parts of platform operations.
In the words of one of our military users describing UDS, “It’s the only thing I’ve ever used that just works.”
What Does UDS Core Do?
Before we answer the question of what UDS Core does, let’s look at a few things. First, everyone’s favorite piece of literature: NIST SP 800-53. DOW environments, for good reason, have a long list of security requirements they must comply with. These requirements are called security controls, and for software to run in a mission system, it pretty much has to meet all of them.
Are security controls exciting? Nay. To most people, they’re brutally boring, but not to us! We grew tired of watching the defense industry pay way too much to recreate the compliance wheel over and over, so we built our UDS platform to meet the majority of those NIST SP 800-53 controls out of the box, significantly reducing the timeline for military systems to receive the essential Authorization To Operate (ATO).
Next, let’s look at another unique aspect of national security environments, our special friend: The Airgap. An airgapped network is one that is disconnected from the open Internet, which is a common state for DOW mission systems.
What’s the problem with being airgapped? Since the inception of the Internet, nearly all network and platform components are built to expect consistent Internet connectivity for access to resources and services. So what have military systems done historically? Similar to the compliance problem, organizations have spent far too much time and money manually configuring systems over and over again to work in the airgap. UDS Core solves this challenge with another one of our open source projects, Zarf, an airgap-native package manager for Kubernetes.
The last issue we will discuss before explaining what makes UDS Core so special is a problem with many solutions for the DOW: Vendor Lock. Vendor lock is the core fear that has driven the DOW to recreate the wheel again and again. Who wants to be in the middle of a battle and discover that the vendor creating your mission software has had a change of heart and removed your access? For the sake of national security, buying commercial software must also avoid vendor lock-in. This is why Defense Unicorns believes in open source technology and why UDS Core is fully open source.
UDS Core solves all of these problems that have plagued the DOW, and it does so in a repeatable way. UDS Core is the runtime platform layer of the UDS ecosystem. It gives every application deployed on top of it a consistent, secure, and compliance-ready operating environment, so platform engineers do not have to rebuild those concerns for each project.
UDS Core is the secure foundation your applications run on. It provides shared platform services: identity, networking, logging, monitoring, runtime security, and more, with hardened defaults, and integrates those services automatically with applications that declare their needs through the UDS Package custom resource. UDS Core is designed for the world’s most critical environments.
What’s Next for UDS Core?
We will continue to improve UDS Core, making it faster, more efficient, and easier to use. Missions are rapidly changing and deserve the military’s full focus. We need to stop distracting ourselves with the same platform runtime problems. Use UDS, it just works.
To learn more about UDS Core and try it yourself, explore the documentation at docs.defenseunicorns.com
