Turbocharge Kubernetes with offloaded OVN-Kubernetes and OVS on DPUs#

Alin Serdean (NVIDIA), Amit Zala (NVIDIA), Mael Kimmerlin (NVIDIA), Igal Tsoiref (Red Hat)

• Why: A production-oriented, DPU-offloaded Kubernetes platform (DPF) with benchmark numbers — and a notable strategic shift: OVN-Kubernetes is moving upstream-first, reviving DPU-host mode after roughly two years dormant.
• What: DPF (DOCA Platform Framework) manages DPU fleets declaratively: DPUSet provisioning (BFB images), DPUService/DPUServiceChain lifecycle via ArgoCD, version-compatibility gating, and rollout-velocity budgets; service chaining runs an OpenFlow controller patch-paneling OVS ports on the DPU; OVN-Kubernetes runs in DPU mode with hardware acceleration for workload pods alongside HBN. Measured 354.92 Gbit/s iperf3 between pods across two BF3 nodes through HBN plus the service chain. Future work: OVN-K as the DPU cluster's primary CNI (dropping Flannel), 2+ OVN-K instances per host, RDMA-accelerated traffic in OpenShift, and selective pod offloading instead of "offload everything".
• How: Two-cluster model — host cluster plus DPU clusters run as HyperShift hosted control planes; RHCOS brought to BlueField via a custom coreos-installer flow; the SC CNI stamps DPF service metadata onto OVS ports so the chaining controller can create patch-panel rules.
• Where applicable: NVIDIA BlueField-3 + OpenShift. Treat the numbers as vendor-reported (some slides were marked NVIDIA confidential) — but the OVN-Kubernetes upstream-first shift, DPU-host-mode revival, and the OpenShift integration challenges (CNO, security model, RHCOS) are genuine engineering signal.