Product Overview of Nomad
Nomad, developed by HashiCorp, is a versatile and powerful workload orchestrator designed to simplify the deployment and management of a wide range of applications across various infrastructure environments.
What is Nomad?
Nomad is a flexible scheduler and workload orchestrator that enables organizations to deploy and manage any application, whether containerized, non-containerized, microservices, or batch applications, using a single, unified workflow. This flexibility allows organizations to run diverse workloads on the same infrastructure, making it an ideal solution for managing both legacy and modern applications.
Key Features
Deploy Containers and Legacy Applications
Nomad supports the orchestration of Docker containers, as well as non-containerized applications such as Java Jar files, QEMU virtual machines, and raw commands. This is achieved through pluggable task drivers, which can also be customized for specific workloads.
Efficient Resource Utilization
Nomad optimizes resource usage through a process called bin packing, which ensures that tasks are efficiently placed on client nodes to maximize resource utilization while satisfying all job constraints.
High Availability and Self-Healing
Nomad is designed for high availability and resilience. It automatically handles application, node, and driver failures by monitoring tasks and rescheduling them as necessary. The system uses leader election and state replication to ensure continuous operation even in the event of failures.
Device Plugins and GPU Support
Nomad includes built-in support for GPU workloads, such as machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI), through device plugins. These plugins automatically detect and utilize resources from hardware devices like GPUs, FPGAs, and TPUs.
Multi-Region Federation
Nomad supports multi-region federation, allowing multiple clusters to be linked together. This enables developers to deploy jobs to any cluster in any region and automatically replicates ACL policies, namespaces, resource quotas, and Sentinel policies across all clusters.
Scalability
Nomad is optimistically concurrent, which increases throughput and reduces latency for workloads. It has been proven to scale to clusters of 10,000 nodes in real-world production environments.
Cross-Platform Support
Nomad runs as a single binary and supports macOS, Windows, and Linux clients, allowing application orchestration across on-premise, cloud, and edge environments.
Declarative Job Specification
Nomad uses a declarative job specification system, where users define the specifics of the task and the resources it requires. Nomad then distributes these tasks evenly across the cluster of nodes.
Integration with HashiCorp Ecosystem
Nomad integrates seamlessly with other HashiCorp tools such as Terraform, Consul, and Vault, facilitating provisioning, service discovery, and secrets management within an organization’s existing workflows.
Use Cases and Benefits
Nomad is widely adopted in production by various organizations, including PagerDuty, Target, Citadel, Trivago, SAP, Pandora, Roblox, eBay, and Deluxe Entertainment. Its simplicity, flexibility, scalability, and high performance make it an ideal choice for managing critical business applications across different industries.
In summary, Nomad offers a robust and flexible solution for workload orchestration, enabling organizations to efficiently deploy, manage, and scale a diverse range of applications while ensuring high availability and optimal resource utilization.