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website: use cases page

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Armon Dadgar 2015-09-19 16:19:42 -07:00
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website/source/intro/use-cases.html.markdown
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@ -12,44 +12,27 @@ Before understanding use cases, it's useful to know [what Nomad is](/intro/index
This page lists some concrete use cases for Nomad, but the possible use cases are
much broader than what we cover.
#### General Secret Storage
#### Microservices Platform
At a bare minimum, Nomad can be used for the storage of any secrets. For
example, Nomad would be a fantastic way to store sensitive environment variables,
database credentials, API keys, etc.
Microservices, or Service Oriented Architectures (SOA), are a design paradigm in which many
services with narrow scope, tight state encapsulation, and API driven interfaces interact together
to form a larger application. However, they add an operational challenge of managing hundreds
or thousands of services instead of a few large applications. Nomad provides a platform for
managing microservices making it easier to adopt the paradigm.
Compare this with the current way to store these which might be
plaintext in files, configuration management, a database, etc. It would be
much safer to query these using `vault read` or the API. This protects
the plaintext version of these secrets as well as records access in the Nomad
audit log.
#### Hybrid Cloud Deployments
#### Employee Credential Storage
Nomad is designed to 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
along side an AWS, Azure, or GCE cloud deployment. This makes it easier to migrate workloads
incrementally or to utilize the cloud for bursting.
While this overlaps with "General Secret Storage", Nomad is a good mechanism
for storing credentials that employees share to access web services. The
audit log mechanism lets you know what secrets an employee accessed and
when an employee leaves, it is easier to roll keys and understand which keys
have and haven't been rolled.
#### E-Commerce
#### API Key Generation for Scripts
A typical E-Commerce website has a few types of workloads. There are long-lived services
used for web serving. These include the load balancer, web frontends, API servers, and OLTP databases.
Batch processing using Hadoop or Spark may run periodically for business reporting, user targeting,
or generating product recommendations. Nomad allows all these workloads to share an underlying cluster,
increasing utilization, reducing cost, simplifying scaling and providing a clean abstraction
for developers.
The "dynamic secrets" feature of Nomad is ideal for scripts: an AWS
access key can be generated for the duration of a script, then revoked.
The keypair will not exist before or after the script runs, and the
creation of the keys are completely logged.
This is an improvement over using something like Amazon IAM but still
effectively hardcoding limited-access access tokens in various places.
#### Data Encryption
In addition to being able to store secrets, Nomad can be used to
encrypt/decrypt data that is stored elsewhere. The primary use of this is
to allow applications to encrypt their data while still storing it in the
primary data store.
The benefit of this is that developers do not need to worry about how to
properly encrypt data. The responsibility of encryption is on Nomad
and the security team managing it, and developers just encrypt/decrypt
data as needed.