open-nomad/website/source/intro/use-cases.html.markdown

---
layout: "intro"
page_title: "Use Cases"
sidebar_current: "use-cases"
description: |-
  This page lists some concrete use cases for Nomad, but the possible use cases
  are much broader than what we cover.
---

# Use Cases

This page features Nomad's core use cases.     

Note that the full range of potential use cases is broader than what is covered here.  

## Docker Container Orchestration

Organizations are increasingly moving towards a Docker centric workflow for
application deployment and management. This transition requires new tooling
to automate placement, perform job updates, enable self-service for developers,
and to handle failures automatically. Nomad supports a [first-class Docker workflow](/docs/drivers/docker.html)
and integrates seamlessly with [Consul](/guides/integrations/consul-integration/index.html)
and [Vault](/docs/vault-integration/index.html) to enable a complete solution
while maximizing operational flexibility. Nomad is easy to use, can scale to
thousands of nodes in a single cluster, and can easily deploy across private data
centers and multiple clouds.

## Legacy Application Deployment

A virtual machine based application deployment strategy can lead to low hardware
utlization rates and high infrastructure costs. While a Docker-based deployment
strategy can be impractical for some organizations or use cases, the potential for
greater automation, increased resilience, and reduced cost is very attractive.
Nomad natively supports running legacy applications, static binaries, JARs, and
simple OS commands directly. Workloads are natively isolated at runtime and bin
packed to maximize efficiency and utilization (reducing cost). Developers and
operators benefit from API-driven automation and enhanced reliability for
applications through automatic failure handling.

## Microservices

Microservices and Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) are a design paradigm in
which many services with narrow scope, tight state encapsulation, and API driven
communication interact together to form a larger solution. However, managing hundreds
or thousands of services instead of a few large applications creates an operational
challenge. Nomad elegantly integrates with [Consul](/guides/integrations/consul-integration/index.html)
for automatic service registration and dynamic rendering of configuration files. Nomad
and Consul together provide an ideal solution for managing microservices, making it
easier to adopt the paradigm.

## Batch Processing Workloads

As data science and analytics teams grow in size and complexity, they increasingly
benefit from highly performant and scalable tools that can run batch workloads with
minimal operational overhead. Nomad can natively run batch jobs, [parameterized](https://www.hashicorp.com/blog/replacing-queues-with-nomad-dispatch) jobs, and [Spark](https://github.com/hashicorp/nomad-spark)
workloads. Nomad's architecture enables easy scalability and an optimistically
concurrent scheduling strategy that can yield [thousands of container deployments per
second](https://www.hashicorp.com/c1m). Alternatives are overly complex and limited
in terms of their scheduling throughput, scalability, and multi-cloud capabilities.

## Multi-Region and Multi-Cloud Federated Deployments

Nomad is designed to natively handle multi-datacenter and multi-region deployments
and is cloud agnostic. This allows Nomad to schedule in private datacenters running
bare metal, OpenStack, or VMware alongside an AWS, Azure, or GCE cloud deployment.
This makes it easier to migrate workloads incrementally and to utilize the cloud
for bursting.