NVIDIA's NVKE Preview Ships With API Auth Off and Plain HTTP

A GitHub repository called NVKE, short for NVIDIA Kubernetes Engine, carries a 2026 NVIDIA copyright line and an Apache-2.0 licence, and its own README says not to run it in production.

The repository sits in the dsx-ai-factory GitHub organisation rather than NVIDIA's own. Its README does not describe it as an official NVIDIA product, though the copyright notice reads "Copyright (c) 2026 NVIDIA CORPORATION & AFFILIATES" and the page carries NVIDIA trademark notices. At the time of capture it showed 259 stars, 71 forks, 78 open issues and 1,538 commits on main. The Releases section was empty.

What NVKE does

The README says NVKE "is not a Kubernetes distribution and not a Cluster API flavour" and calls it "a self-hosting factory for Kubernetes clusters." A platform team installs it on bare-metal NVIDIA GPU machines, then creates isolated workload clusters through the NVKE API or the nvkectl command. Each cluster "has its own Kubernetes control plane, etcd and node pools."

Machines are provisioned by NVIDIA Infra Controller, or NICo, which the README names as the only compatible infrastructure provider at preview. NICo is a separate Apache-2.0 project, at 328 stars on its own repository. Its README describes zero-trust lifecycle automation for bare-metal AI hardware: BMC discovery over Redfish, firmware baselines, BlueField DPU provisioning and tenant isolation across Ethernet, InfiniBand and NVLink. NICo's page does not mention NVKE, and says only that it is under active development and provided "as is."

Node identity in NVKE uses SPIFFE/SPIRE with TPM attestation, and per-cluster etcd encryption is available. Lifecycle features listed are node pools, Kubernetes upgrades and node replacement. A companion project, NVIDIA Kubernetes Recipes (NVKR), builds the node images.

What the preview does not do yet

The README's limitations are specific. The quoted sentence a reader should stop on is this one: "API authentication is off and the API uses plain HTTP after installation."

Limitation stated in the README	Detail
Production use	"we do not recommend NVKE for production workloads"
API security	Authentication off, plain HTTP after install
Management cluster	Does not upgrade, scale or replace itself
Backup	No documented management-plane upgrade or restore procedure
FDE node images	Evaluation only, no data-at-rest confidentiality

So the management plane that creates and operates every workload cluster is, in this preview, an unauthenticated HTTP endpoint that cannot update itself. The README says APIs, configuration and behaviour "can change between releases."

Where it fits

Related open-source infrastructure coverage on this site: Rivet's S3-backed agent orchestrator and the Floci AWS emulator.

The repository lists no tagged release of NVKE. The only version string on the page is the Go toolchain, 1.27.3. Neither README gives a date for production readiness or a change to the NICo-only restriction.