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website: intro page

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Armon Dadgar 2015-09-19 16:09:21 -07:00
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@ -19,51 +19,42 @@ guide for all available features as well as internals.
## What is Nomad?
Nomad is a tool for securely accessing _secrets_. A secret is anything
that you want to tightly control access to, such as API keys, passwords,
certificates, and more. Nomad provides a unified interface to any
secret, while providing tight access control and recording a detailed
audit log.
A modern system requires access to a multitude of secrets: database
credentials, API keys for external services, credentials for
service-oriented architecture communication, etc. Understanding who is
accessing what secrets is already very difficult and platform-specific.
Adding on key rolling, secure storage, and detailed audit logs is almost
impossible without a custom solution. This is where Nomad steps in.
Examples work best to showcase Nomad. Please see the
[use cases](/intro/use-cases.html).
Nomad is a tool for managing a cluster of machines and running applications
on them. Nomad abstracts away machines and the location of applications,
and instead enables user to declare what they want to run and Nomad handles
where they should run and how to run them.
The key features of Nomad are:
* **Secure Secret Storage**: Arbitrary key/value secrets can be stored
in Nomad. Nomad encrypts these secrets prior to writing them to persistent
storage, so gaining access to the raw storage isn't enough to access
your secrets. Nomad can write to disk, [Consul](http://www.consul.io),
and more.
* **Docker Support**: Nomad supports Docker as a first-class workload type.
Jobs submitted to Nomad can use the “docker” driver to easily deploy containerized
applications to a cluster. Nomad enforces the user-specified constraints,
ensuring the application only runs in the correct region, datacenter, and host
environment. Jobs can specify the number of instances needed and
Nomad will handle placement and recover from failures automatically.
* **Dynamic Secrets**: Nomad can generate secrets on-demand for some
systems, such as AWS or SQL databases. For example, when an application
needs to access an S3 bucket, it asks Nomad for credentials, and Nomad
will generate an AWS keypair with valid permissions on demand. After
creating these dynamic secrets, Nomad will also automatically revoke them
after the lease is up.
* **Operationally Simple**: Nomad ships as a single binary, both for clients and servers,
and requires no external services for coordination or storage. Nomad combines features
of both resource managers and schedulers into a single system. Nomad builds on the strength
of [Serf](https://www.serfdom.io) and [Consul](https://www.consul.io), distributed management
tools by [HashiCorp](https://hashicorp.com).
* **Data Encryption**: Nomad can encrypt and decrypt data without storing
it. This allows security teams to define encryption parameters and
developers to store encrypted data in a location such as SQL without
having to design their own encryption methods.
* **Multi-Datacenter and Multi-Region Aware**: Nomad models infrastructure as
groups of datacenters which form a larger region. Scheduling operates at the region
level allowing for cross-datacenter scheduling. Multiple regions federate together
allowing jobs to be registered globally.
* **Leasing and Renewal**: All secrets in Nomad have a _lease_ associated
with it. At the end of the lease, Nomad will automatically revoke that
secret. Clients are able to renew leases via built-in renew APIs.
* **Flexible Workloads**: Nomad has extensible support for task drivers, allowing it to run
containerized, virtualized, and standalone applications. Users can easily start Docker
containers, VMs, or application runtimes like Java. Nomad supports Linux, Windows, BSD and OSX,
providing the flexibility to run any workload.
* **Revocation**: Nomad has built-in support for secret revocation. Nomad
can revoke not only single secrets, but a tree of secrets, for example
all secrets read by a specific user, or all secrets of a particular type.
Revocation assists in key rolling as well as locking down systems in the
case of an intrusion.
* **Built for Scale**: Nomad was designed from the ground up to support global scale
infrastructure. Nomad is distributed and highly available, using both
leader election and state replication to provide availability in the face
of failures. Nomad is optimistically concurrent, enabling all servers to participate
in scheduling decisions which increases the total throughput and reduces latency
to support demanding workloads.
## Next Steps
@ -72,4 +63,5 @@ multiple ways Nomad can be used. Then see
[how Nomad compares to other software](/intro/vs/index.html)
to see how it fits into your existing infrastructure. Finally, continue onwards with
the [getting started guide](/intro/getting-started/install.html) to use
Nomad to read, write, and create real secrets and see how it works in practice.
Nomad to run a job and see how it works in practice.