How Zipline Uses Hedgehog for AI Training

Zipline is a drone delivery company that trains AI on private cloud infrastructure to autonomously fly drones and drop packages in precise delivery locations. Florian Berchtold, Zipline’s Principal Engineer responsible for AI developer productivity, highlighted Hedgehog’s crucial role in their operations. Zipline chose an on-premises strategy for their AI infrastructure due to significant cost efficiencies and enhanced governance compared to public cloud options. Florian, a software engineer rather than a network engineer, sought a high-bandwidth networking solution that didn’t demand extensive network CLI expertise. Hedgehog provided a Kubernetes-native, declarative API, allowing Zipline to describe their infrastructure’s desired state in a familiar language, abstracting away complex networking configurations like port channels.

Previously, with a smaller server footprint, Zipline utilized Hedgehog for collapsed core designs, achieving high availability and high bandwidth on a modest scale without requiring specialized networking knowledge. Now, with over sixty servers across multiple racks, Hedgehog continues to be their preferred solution, supporting the larger spine-leaf topology required for their expanded infrastructure. However, a gap existed: while Hedgehog solved the internal fabric networking, Zipline still needed to connect their private cloud to the public internet, necessitating a firewall/router solution. This interim solution involved expensive, commodity legacy firewalls that provided far more capability than Zipline needed for the limited bandwidth they utilized, leading to significant unnecessary costs.

Florian anticipates that Hedgehog’s new Transit Gateway demonstration will fill this crucial gap. He expects the gateway to provide essential routing capabilities, allowing their internal private fabric IPs to access the public internet, along with Network Address Translation (NAT) and basic port forwarding to expose on-premise hosted services. This new functionality from Hedgehog aims to replace their costly existing firewalls, offering a more integrated and cost-effective solution that aligns with their cloud-native infrastructure and declarative management approach.