The Origin Story
Managing UDP services in production is difficult. Really difficult. At scale, it becomes a constant source of operational overhead, unexpected costs, and sleepless nights during incidents. Cloud providers don't see UDP as a strategic service and have invested little in making it easy to use at scale. Load balancers and auto-scaling groups are not designed for UDP. The server software is ancient and locked into an "early internet" architecture. No serverless option existed.
The problems are consistent across industries and protocols:
- Infrastructure overhead - Managing servers, load balancers, auto-scaling groups, and all the operational complexity that comes with them plus fighting their TCP-centric designs
- Cost inefficiency - Paying for idle capacity to handle the spiky peak loads common with UDP, with no way to scale to zero during quiet periods
- Security surface area - Keeping UDP servers patched, hardened, and compliant requires constant vigilance and care due to frequent regressions and subtle changes in behavior
- Development friction - Setting up environments for every developer and every feature branch is prohibitively expensive. Deployments take hours
Meanwhile, the rest of the application stack had evolved. Web front-ends and REST APIs enjoy serverless architectures that have eliminated most of these problems. Teams could expose endpoints with API Gateway, deploy Lambda functions, write to DynamoDB, and publish to SNS without thinking about servers. But UDP remained stuck in the old world of manual infrastructure management.
We built Proxylity to bring UDP into the serverless era. No more managing infrastructure. No more capacity planning. No more paying for idle servers. Just define your UDP listeners in CloudFormation and connect them directly to your serverless AWS resources. Deploy in minutes, scale automatically, pay only for delivered packets.
The result is what we wish we'd had years ago: a UDP gateway that handles all the infrastructure complexity so teams can focus on their actual application logic, deploy faster, and sleep better at night.
Lee Harding
Founder & Principal Engineer
Lee is a lifelong technologist and two-time CTO with successful exits at Zapproved and Eleven, where he built and scaled enterprise SaaS platforms serving Fortune 500 customers.
Real-World SaaS and UDP at Scale:
- Architected secure legal hold management platform at Zapproved serving Fortune 500 corporations and elite law firms
- Architected and operated RADIUS over UDP infrastructure handling 6,000 packets per second in production at Eleven
- Deep expertise in AWS serverless architectures, having built production systems on Lambda, Step Functions, DynamoDB, and EventBridge
- 15+ years building and scaling distributed systems for high-availability, mission-critical applications
Lee's experience combines the two critical domains Proxylity serves: UDP at scale and serverless architectures. Proxylity UDP Gateway is the product of lessons learned from managing UDP infrastructure in production, distilled into a service that eliminates those operational challenges entirely.
Philosophy: Infrastructure should be defined as code, scale automatically, and let developers focus on building features instead of managing servers. Proxylity brings that philosophy to UDP.
Our Mission
We believe that UDP services should be as easy to develop, deploy and scale as any other serverless resource. No team should have to manage infrastructure, worry about capacity planning, or pay for idle servers just to handle UDP traffic.
Proxylity exists to make UDP serverless. We're building the infrastructure layer that lets teams deploy UDP listeners in minutes, scale automatically from zero to millions of packets per second, and integrate directly with AWS services they already use.
Whether you're building IoT backends, gaming services, enterprise protocols like DNS or RADIUS, or any other UDP application, you should be able to focus on your application logic—not infrastructure management.
That's what we're here to enable. Read more about our approach on the Proxylity Blog.
Company Information
Founded: 2024
Headquarters: Portland, Oregon, USA
Legal Entity: Proxylity LLC
AWS Partnership: AWS Partner with Qualified Software
Contact:
General inquiries: team@proxylity.com
Sales questions: sales@proxylity.com
Support: support@proxylity.com