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Nvidia Kubernetes Engine (NVKE)
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- DeepHorus
Nvidia has introduced Nvidia Kubernetes Engine (NVKE), a managed Kubernetes service for customers’ Nvidia GPU infrastructure. As a preview, NVKE provides a management plane that platform teams install to create and operate clusters. Each workload cluster gets its own Kubernetes control plane, etcd and node pools, accessed through the Kubernetes API and kubectl.
NVKE is not a Kubernetes distribution or a Cluster API flavour. Nvidia calls it a “self-hosting factory”: a temporary seed cluster stands up a management cluster, which then provisions and lifecycle-manages isolated workload clusters. The management plane runs NVKE services and infrastructure controllers; workload clusters run customer applications.
At preview, users supply machines, networking, node images and registries, and configure access to Nvidia Infra Controller (NICo), the sole compatible infrastructure provider. The local quickstart needs Linux amd64 or arm64, at least 6 CPUs, 12 GiB free memory and 100 GiB free disk, plus Docker and virtual TPM support. macOS evaluation runs inside a Colima virtual machine.
Capabilities include independent workload clusters, node-pool scaling and deletion, Kubernetes upgrades and node replacement. Nodes attest through SPIFFE/SPIRE using their TPM before receiving join credentials, and etcd encryption is available per cluster. Nvidia Kubernetes Recipes builds node images and NVKE components from pinned inputs.
The preview carries limitations. After installation, API authentication is off and the API uses plain HTTP, so operators must configure authentication and protected access before admitting callers. The management cluster cannot upgrade, scale or replace itself, and there is no management-plane upgrade or backup/restore procedure. FDE node images are for evaluation and provide no data-at-rest confidentiality.
Nvidia warns that APIs and behavior may change between releases and does not recommend NVKE for production. Developers need Go 1.27.3 and GNU Make 4 or later. A make build writes nine binaries to bin/, including agent, updater, controller and nvkectl.
