High-availability Kubernetes Support
@drew is already working on this.
Since Sep 15, 2026.
Assessment
This issue has not been assessed yet.
Description
Create an officially supported Helm chart for deploying Kubernetes onto existing Kubernetes infrastructure. Ensure Kubernetes deployments are suitable for enterprise deployments. Establish a plan for making OpenShell components ready for enterprise.
Overview
- Helm Chart
- Publish as OCI resource on ghcr.io
- Provide Ingress to OpenShell Gateway via Kubernetes Gateway API (this should be configurable so we can disable ingress)
- Control Plane (gateway) Authnz (keycloak to start)
- High Availability Gateway
- Supports horizontal scaling, rollouts, and client connection rebalancing
- Ensure postgres support is fully tested. (todo: can we use etcd or some other db solution)
- Configuring Sandboxes
- Specify memory, cpu, and other pod specs.
- Reduce need for privileged security capabilities (eg no more CAP_NET_ADMIN)
- OpenShell supervisor is injected onto the container via image volumes. (sap to contribute implementation)
-
Observability(includes both gateway and sandbox health) (moved to NVIDIA/OpenShell#1055)- Logs exporting
- Metrics (Prometheus, already landed)
- Dashboards (Grafana/similar)
- Resiliency
- Sandboxes are resilient to network disconnection between supervisor and openshell-server for Y period of time.
- Clarify heartbeat of supervisor to openshell-server, possibly some jitter in case of thundering herd scenarios. basic service-like heartbeats. scope here is monitoring tens of thousands of agents.
- Upgrading OpenShell
- Gateway data/schemas are migrated as necessary on upgrades
- Sandbox containers can be rolled with a new version of the supervisor. this needs to get controlled and configured for existing sandboxes.
- Sandbox containers themselves can be updated
- Unified gateway configuration file (see RFC 0002 - Gateway Configuration File)
-
Kubernetes Operatorhttps://github.com/NVIDIA/OpenShell/issues/1719 - We need a way to develop and test k8s features locally.
- K3s + skaffold or tilt or some other dev script
- Test infrastructure
- Run on a single node kind cluster
- Run on full Cloud cluster (OpenShift or GKE)
Milestones
M1 - mvp
- Helm Chart
- Developer loop
- OpenShell server accepts a kube config and is decoupled from any k3s
- Documentation w/ rbac details for running inside an existing kube cluster
- parameterize e2e tests to point to any cluster
- Unified gateway config
- Initial documentation and deployment guidance available
M2 - reliability
- Test coverage on OpenShift and major Kubernetes distributions
- Security context privileges are dropped.
- Implement runtime class configs: kata and gvisor
- Gateway can horizontally scale
- Agent and operator friendly observability (gateway and sandbox)
M3 - operating OpenShell at scale
- OpenShell Kubernetes Operator
- Support upgrading/snapshotting sandboxes
- Dominant language
- Rust
- Stars
- 8.7k
- Forks
- 1.3k
- Avg merge
- 2d 7h
- Merged PRs (30d)
- 243
Contributor guide
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