Today we're announcing a partnership between Mulga Defense Corporation and Critical Shift. Spinifex, our open-source AWS-compatible cloud, now ships pre-integrated on Nexus, Critical Shift's US-manufactured rugged JADC2 platform. The result is a full cloud-native stack inside a Pelican case, engineered to military environmental and EMC standards, available through a domestic US supply chain.
The premise is simple. Operators have invested years in AWS: Terraform, IaC, Kubernetes, S3-backed pipelines, and the workloads running on top of them. They now need that same capability where the cloud can't reach. Forward, in this context, means contested networks, denied environments, and sites where the bandwidth back to AWS is a satellite hop you may not have. Spinifex lets operators take their existing AWS workloads and lift-and-shift them, unchanged, to the tactical edge. Nexus is the hardware that gets them there without compromise.
Why Nexus
Nexus is a flexible, high-performance command and control platform designed to integrate with mission-critical products, including legacy systems, partner equipment, and emerging technologies. Engineered for quick deployment, it ships in a carry-on-sized rugged Pelican case: highly portable, yet resilient in harsh environments. Configurable compute, network connectivity, and integration features enable rapid customisation and real-time C2 operations across all domains.
What makes Nexus the right substrate for Spinifex isn't a single feature. It's how the design choices line up against an edge-cloud workload:
- Configurable by design. Customisable compute, networking, and integration capabilities for a wide range of missions. Spinifex configurations from a single motherboard up to a 3-node high-availability cluster slot directly into the same chassis.
- Seamless interoperability. AWS workloads running in the cloud lift-and-shift to the edge on Spinifex without rewrite. Your existing EC2 instances, EBS volumes, S3 buckets, and VPCs work the same; your Terraform plans target Nexus the same way they target a region; your existing AWS-native pipelines deploy unchanged. Nexus brings partner products, legacy systems, and emerging technologies into that same integration surface.
- Carry-on portable, ruggedised for the field. The platform is engineered against MIL-STD-810 (environmental) and MIL-STD-461 (EMC), the two standards that decide whether a system survives a real deployment, not just a demo.
- Optional built-in display. An optional screen integrated into the case lid means real-time monitoring and control without needing an external monitor on the LZ. Spinifex's instance and storage views render directly to the lid display.
- Extensive component selection. Compute, networking (switching, wireless, mesh), storage, and advanced integration including SatCom, Software-Defined Radios (SDR), encryption, and sensors. Spinifex's PCIe passthrough surfaces accelerators, SDRs, and capture cards inside guest VMs at near-native performance.
US-manufactured, by intent
Critical Shift designs and manufactures Nexus in the United States. For defense operators in the US and partner nations under the AUKUS umbrella, that's not a marketing line. It's a procurement constraint: ITAR-aware supply chain, US-domiciled manufacturing, and a hardware vendor that can speak directly to programme offices about provenance.
Spinifex is open-source under AGPL-3.0, written in Australia and the USA, and runs air-gapped without a hidden control plane. Combined with Nexus's US manufacturing, the full stack, silicon to APIs, has a verifiable origin story across both AUKUS pillars. That matters when the system is the sovereign infrastructure for a forward team.
Three configurations to start
The pre-integrated SKUs available on day one mirror the three deployment shapes we see most often in the field:
- Hardened Field: a single motherboard in one Nexus. The smallest viable Spinifex node: a single-host cloud, complete EC2/EBS/S3 surface, suitable for forward teams operating solo.
- Hardened HA Field Cloud: three motherboards in one Nexus, configured for high availability. Predastore erasure-coded object storage, Viperblock replicated block, and live workload migration across nodes, all inside a single carry-on case.
- Hardened Field GPU: one motherboard plus an NVIDIA L4. For inference workloads at the edge: vision pipelines, signals analysis, ISR triage. Spinifex passes the L4 through to guest VMs at near-native performance.
What this unlocks
Operators no longer need to choose between cloud-native tooling and forward deployability. The same Terraform plan that targets AWS targets a Nexus on the LZ. The same S3 bucket that backs your data lake at home backs ingest at the edge. The same images you build for AWS boot on Spinifex without modification, including user-data, instance metadata, and SSH key injection.
For Critical Shift's customers, Nexus gains a fully-supported, production-ready cloud runtime out of the box. For Mulga's customers, Spinifex gains a hardened, US-manufactured reference platform that ships pre-integrated and ready to deploy. The two halves were always going to meet. This partnership is the formal version.
Get in touch
Pre-integrated Nexus + Spinifex configurations are available now. To discuss a deployment, request an evaluation unit, or talk to either team about a specific mission profile, get in touch via our contact page, or configure a unit on the Spinifex purchase page.
Thanks to the Critical Shift team for the engineering work that went into making Nexus the right home for Spinifex, and to the early operators on both sides who told us, in no uncertain terms, that this needed to exist.
