Anduril
Anduril is a defense technology company with a mission to transform US and allied military capabilities with advanced technology. Anduril currently has more than 2200 employees across its offices in the United States, United Kingdom and Australia.
At Anduril, it is very important to keep a technological edge and make use of the best possible tools for software development. Generative AI is one such tool due to its ability to increase productivity if utilized properly. Even a 10% bump in developer productivity saves hundreds of thousands of dollars, and more importantly, helps Anduril ship and test their mission critical code significantly faster.
However, as a defense company, Anduril must obey strict security and compliance rules, with any of their code staying within Anduril-owned air gapped environments.
As Cy Sack, Head of Business Systems at Anduril, puts it:
Our code is important to us, and often strictly confidential, so SaaS solutions like GitHub Copilot and others were not viable options. We considered making our own generative AI model within our environment, but when we found Codeium (Windsurf), it was like seeing a big red “easy” button.
Anduril and Windsurf
From the beginning, Windsurf made sense to Anduril because of the ability to run the system in a fully air gapped manner within Anduril’s environment. No other AI-powered assistance tool offers this deployment method. In addition, Anduril found valuable the additional security, quality, and observability wins from the out-of-the-box integrations with Anduril’s existing IAM provider, ability to personalize the system to Anduril’s existing code in their self-hosted GitHub repositories (while respecting access control boundaries), and in-depth real time analytics dashboards.
Anduril has been a great design partner to Windsurf as our first customer on AWS GovCloud - at Windsurf we had to lean into our infrastructure background to make the software run on the limited set of GPU SKUs available on GovCloud, simplify our deployment process to a single Docker Compose App, and enable pulling images from their own container registry (to be truly fully air gapped, even during deployment). We at Windsurf have now confidently deployed our software to multiple government and government adjacent entities.
Results and Looking Forward
Windsurf has saved Anduril many hundreds of hours of solely typing time for their developers in the last few months. This is through accepted code completion suggestions that accelerate Anduril developers through boilerplate and other common tasks. The qualitative feedback backed the value up - Cameron Sinko, an engineer at Anduril, says:
I like how simple Codeium (Windsurf) is and that it doesn’t get in the way of development. It has made it effortless to write high quality log messages, even with a custom print format and logging module.
Even more than the time saved today, Anduril is excited about the velocity at which Windsurf ships improvements.
Collin Parker, Director of Internal Tools at Anduril, says:
In the last few months, the Codeium (Windsurf) team iterated on our feedback, releasing more enterprise extensions, improved their model and context awareness, and more. Even though it is not a SaaS solution, they made the update process super simple, allowing us to stay up-to-date with the best that generative AI for software development has to offer.
Looking forward, Windsurf will keep developing, testing, and shipping more and better functionalities to Anduril and our other enterprise customers.
Windsurf is proud to be supporting Anduril, as well as a number of others in the defense and government sectors who have similar requirements around self-hosting. We do not believe that companies need to reduce their security posture just to adopt this revolutionary technology. If your company has concerns around private data security, please do reach out: