NVIDIA Hands OpenShell to the CNCF and Expands Its Open Source AI Infrastructure

OFFICIAL Written by GPN · Nov 11, 2026, 3:00 PM ET · · Tech

NVIDIA is deepening its open source commitment at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon. The company announced on November 10 that it is contributing OpenShell, an open source runtime for securing and governing autonomous agents, to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation as a Sandbox project.

OpenShell gives organizations deterministic controls over what AI agents can do, letting teams enforce policies as agents use tools, access inference services and execute workloads. Hundreds of organizations have already put it to use, and the project has received tens of thousands of contributions in less than a year since launch. Linux Foundation CEO Jim Zemlin said the contribution gives developers common ground to build on and a chance to shape how agent security evolves.

NVIDIA is also contributing to Agent Substrate, a Google-originated open source framework for running long-lived agent workloads at scale on Kubernetes that has been accepted into the CNCF Sandbox. The two projects will be integrated so enterprises can secure and govern agents across clouds and on-premises systems.

Three new open source components extend the NVIDIA DSX AI Factory Platform: NVIDIA Kubernetes Engine and NVIDIA Kubernetes Recipes, now in public preview, provide building blocks for managed Kubernetes services on GPU infrastructure, while NVIDIA Snapshot restores checkpointed inference replicas in seconds without a model reload or warmup. In testing, Crusoe cut a workload's time to ready from roughly eight minutes to 31 seconds, and Saturn Cloud cut vLLM startup times from between two and 8.5 minutes to between six and 34 seconds.

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NVIDIA Blog

NVIDIA Hands OpenShell to the CNCF and Expands Its Open Source AI Infrastructure

Facts gathered from

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