NVIDIA contributes OpenShell agent runtime to the CNCF Sandbox

Background

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) is an open-source foundation that hosts cloud-native projects. Its Sandbox is an early-stage tier for projects joining the foundation.

What happened

On 10 November 2026 NVIDIA said it is contributing OpenShell, an open-source runtime for securing and governing autonomous AI agents, to the CNCF ^[1]. The NVIDIA blog describes OpenShell as a CNCF Sandbox project, governed by the organizations building it into their products ^[1]. The blog says hundreds of organizations have used OpenShell and that it has received tens of thousands of contributions in less than a year since launch ^[1].

Key details

NVIDIA also said it is contributing to Agent Substrate, a framework originated by Google for running long-running agent workloads on Kubernetes. The blog says Agent Substrate has been accepted into the CNCF Sandbox ^[1]. NVIDIA Kubernetes Engine (NVKE) and NVIDIA Kubernetes Recipes (NVKR), open-source building blocks for managed Kubernetes on GPU infrastructure, are in public preview ^[1]. NVIDIA Snapshot is an open-source modular component that restores checkpointed inference replicas quickly ^[1].

Customer example

The blog cites Crusoe reducing time-to-ready for a GLM-5.3 workload on Crusoe Cloud from about eight minutes to 31 seconds on NVIDIA HGX B300 systems ^[1]. This is a figure Crusoe reported, and NVIDIA cites it.