3.4 KiB
| layout | page_title | sidebar_current | description |
|---|---|---|---|
| intro | Introduction | what | Welcome to the intro guide to Nomad! This guide is the best place to start with Nomad. We cover what Nomad is, what problems it can solve, how it compares to existing software, and contains a quick start for using Nomad. |
Introduction to Nomad
Welcome to the intro guide to Nomad! This guide is the best place to start with Nomad. We cover what Nomad is, what problems it can solve, how it compares to existing software, and contains a quick start for using Nomad.
If you are already familiar with the basics of Nomad, the documentation provides a better reference 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.
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, and more.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
Next Steps
See the page on Nomad use cases to see the multiple ways Nomad can be used. Then see how Nomad compares to other software to see how it fits into your existing infrastructure. Finally, continue onwards with the getting started guide to use Nomad to read, write, and create real secrets and see how it works in practice.