Cluster Components
Reference for the components within the CKS Managed Control Plane and Managed Data Plane
Learn more
Learn more about CKS cluster architecture.
Managed Control Plane
To ensure security and stability, CoreWeave provides a Managed Control Plane for CKS clusters.
Supported Kubernetes versions
CKS can create clusters with Kubernetes versions:
v1.29v1.30v1.31v1.32
The default version for a new cluster is v1.32.
Managed Data Plane components
The CKS Managed Data Plane comes with several preinstalled components, which allow customers to start running workloads immediately after deploying their CKS cluster. These components are configurable to allow for the desired state of a CKS cluster.
Info
- Some older clusters' namespaces may not have the
cw-prefix shown in the tables below. - Components and API versions change often. The versions deployed to your cluster may be newer than shown below.
Networking
| Component | Namespace | Version | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
cilium | cw-cilium-system | 1.16.1 | Container Network Interface (CNI) that uses eBPF for efficient load-balancing. |
calico (deprecated) | cw-calico-system | 3.29.1 | Container Network Interface (CNI) used on older clusters; no longer supported for new CKS clusters. |
coredns | 1.11.1 | A flexible DNS server consisting of multiple plugins that manage in-cluster DNS and resolve service records inside clusters. This runs in the CKS Managed Control Plane. | |
konnectivity-agent | kube-system | 0.30.3 | Isolates CKS Control Plane traffic from the cluster network and creates a TCP level proxy to konnectivity-server, which sits alongside the Control Plane to tunnel traffic from the Control Plane to in-cluster endpoints. |
metallb | cw-metallb-system | 0.13.4 | Handles IP Address Management (IPAM) for LoadBalancer services; is not used for advertisements. See How to: Expose a Service |
node-local-dns | kube-system | 1.22.28 | Improves cluster DNS performance and speeds up traffic between CoreDNS instances. The node-local-dns Pods run CoreDNS in local caching mode as a DaemonSet over TCP, avoiding dropped packets and reducing tail latency. |
Cluster management
| Component | Namespace | Version | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
hpc-verification | cw-hpc-verification | 1.8.0 | Validates the Node is in an optimal state. These tests only run on idle Nodes. |
node-problem-detector | cw-node-problem-detector | 1.5.0 | Framework for running health checks for each Node run as a DaemonSet. It allows CoreWeave to quickly identify Nodes that are misbehaving and mark them as Unschedulable. |
nfd | cw-nfd | 0.9.0 | Node Feature Discovery. Detects hardware features and labels Nodes accordingly for use in scheduling decisions. |
Info
Older clusters may have jspolicy installed in the jspolicy-policies-<Org ID>-<cluster ID> and tenant-<Org ID>-<cluster ID> namespaces. Newer clusters do not include JSPolicy.
Observability and security
| Component | Namespace | Version | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
victoria-metrics | cw-victoria-metrics | 0.45.0 | Collects metrics from inside the cluster and relays them to a logging solution. |
vmagent | cw-victoria-metrics | Gathers metrics for Victoria Metrics. | |
metrics-server | kube-system | 0.6.2 | Only installed on clusters deployed before July 7, 2025. |
node-pci-exporter | cw-exporters | 1.5.0 | Extends the node-exporter running as part of the Prometheus stack, exposing additional metrics about deployed GPUs. |
gpu-thermal-exporter | cw-exporters | Emits hardware metrics for GPU thermal data for Node health monitoring. | |
nvlink-exporter | cw-exporters | Exports metrics for NVLink performance in GPU Nodes. | |
ping-exporter | cw-ping-exporter | Measures packet loss to configured network targets for connectivity checks. | |
promtail | cw-promtail | Forwards Node logs centrally using Grafana's Promtail. | |
crowdstrike | cw-crowdstrike | 7.19.0-17219-1.falcon-linux.Release.US-2 | CrowdStrike Falcon cybersecurity tooling. |
Storage
| Component | Namespace | Version | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
vast-csi | cw-vast-csi | 2.3.1 | Container Storage Interface for Vast Storage. |
Object Storage
| Component | Namespace | Version | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
lota | cw-object-storage | v1.25.1 | CoreWeave's Local Object Transfer Accelerator (LOTA) for AI Object Storage. Learn more about LOTA. |
Hardware
| Component | Namespace | Version | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
k8s-device-plugin | cw-nvidia-device-plugin | 0.12.3 | NVIDIA's official device plugin for GPU-enabled containers in Kubernetes. |
nvidia-imex | cw-nvidia-imex | Enables the NVIDIA Internode Memory Exchange (IMEX) service. | |
rdma-shared-dp | cw-rdma | Device plugin to support InfiniBand and RDMA hardware resources. |
Warning
CKS does not require NVIDIA's GPU Operator. To avoid conflicts, customers should not attempt to install it.