NVIDIA Gives OpenShell and AI Infrastructure Tools to Open Source
NVIDIA is contributing its OpenShell runtime for securing autonomous agents to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, alongside work on Agent Substrate and new AI infrastructure tools for Kubernetes. The company says the contributions will help organizations govern agents and operate AI workloads at scale.
- NVIDIA is contributing OpenShell to the CNCF Sandbox.
- The company is contributing to Google-originated Agent Substrate.
- NVIDIA Kubernetes Engine and NVIDIA Kubernetes Recipes are in public preview.
- NVIDIA Snapshot restores checkpointed replicas without model reload or warmup.
- NVIDIA says its tools target AI infrastructure and agent workloads on Kubernetes.
OpenShell moves into CNCF governance
NVIDIA announced the contributions at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon, the flagship conference for the Kubernetes and cloud-native communities. OpenShell will become a CNCF Sandbox project, placing its development under the governance of organizations building it into their products and drawing on security expertise from the wider community.
OpenShell is an open source runtime designed to secure and govern autonomous agents. It applies deterministic controls to agent activity, allowing teams to enforce policies as agents use tools, access inference services and execute workloads. Its architecture can connect with an organization’s compute, inference providers, credential storage and monitoring tools.
According to NVIDIA, hundreds of organizations have used OpenShell, and the project has received tens of thousands of contributions in less than a year since its launch. Jim Zemlin, CEO of the Linux Foundation, said the contribution gives developers “a shared foundation to build on and an opportunity to shape how agent security evolves.”
Agent Substrate targets large-scale agent workloads
NVIDIA is also contributing to Agent Substrate, a Google-originated open source framework for operating long-running agent workloads at scale on Kubernetes. The project has been accepted into the CNCF Sandbox.
NVIDIA said Agent Substrate will work with NVIDIA Dynamo for model inference and KAI Scheduler for shared cluster resource allocation. The combination brings agent execution, inference serving and resource scheduling together on Kubernetes.
Agent Substrate preserves agent environments between tasks while releasing compute when agents are idle. By suspending and resuming environments across a shared pool of agents, it can scale workloads without keeping dedicated compute running for every session. NVIDIA and Google are also collaborating on integrating OpenShell with Agent Substrate for agent security and governance across cloud and on-premises systems.
New tools extend NVIDIA’s AI factory platform
NVIDIA announced three open source components for its DSX AI Factory Platform: NVIDIA Kubernetes Engine, NVIDIA Kubernetes Recipes and NVIDIA Snapshot. NVIDIA Kubernetes Engine and NVIDIA Kubernetes Recipes are available in public preview and provide building blocks for managed Kubernetes services on GPU infrastructure.
The tools automate cluster lifecycle management and provide signed, version-pinned images. NVIDIA said Mirantis, Netris, OpenNebula Systems, Rafay, Spectro Cloud and vCluster, together with Firmus and SK Telecom, have aligned with the company on integration plans.
NVIDIA Snapshot is designed to bring additional inference capacity online quickly. The modular component restores checkpointed replicas in seconds without model reload or warmup, supporting startup, recovery and elasticity for inference and agentic workloads on Kubernetes.
Crusoe tested GLM-5.3 on Crusoe Cloud and reduced readiness time from roughly eight minutes to 31 seconds, according to NVIDIA. Saturn Cloud reduced vLLM startup times from between two and 8.5 minutes to six and 34 seconds in its benchmark for scale-from-zero inference.
