nomad

Nomad

HashiCorp Nomad is a lightweight, flexible workload orchestrator capable of managing containerized, non-containerized, and virtualized applications across bare metal and multi-cloud environments.

When to Use

• Simple & Flexible Workload Orchestration: Deploying containers, non-containerized binaries, and batch jobs across clouds and bare metal.
• Lightweight Alternative to Kubernetes: Single-binary cluster management with significantly lower operational complexity.
• HashiCorp Ecosystem Integration: Native interoperability with Consul (service discovery) and Vault (secret management).
• Hybrid Multi-Region Workloads: Scheduling Windows and Linux jobs seamlessly across distributed datacenters.

Quick Start

job "example" {
  datacenters = ["dc1"]

  group "cache" {
    task "redis" {
      driver = "docker"

      config {
        image = "redis:7"
      }

      resources {
        cpu    = 500 # 500 MHz
        memory = 256 # 256 MB
      }
    }
  }
}

Core Concepts

Production Job Specification (job.nomad)

Deploying a containerized service with Consul and Vault:

job "api-service" {
  datacenters = ["dc1"]
  type        = "service"

  group "web" {
    count = 3

    update {
      max_parallel     = 1
      min_healthy_time = "30s"
      healthy_deadline = "3m"
      auto_revert      = true # Automatic rollback on deployment failure
    }

    network {
      port "http" {
        to = 8080
      }
    }

    service {
      name     = "api-service"
      port     = "http"
      provider = "consul"

      check {
        type     = "http"
        path     = "/healthz"
        interval = "10s"
        timeout  = "2s"
      }
    }

    task "server" {
      driver = "docker"

      config {
        image = "registry.example.com/api-service:v2.1.0"
        ports = ["http"]
      }

      resources {
        cpu    = 500 # MHz
        memory = 512 # MB
      }

      vault {
        policies = ["api-service-policy"]
      }

      template {
        data        = "DATABASE_URL={{ with secret \"secret/data/db\" }}{{ .Data.data.url }}{{ end }}"
        destination = "secrets/file.env"
        env         = true
      }
    }
  }
}