Nomad

Overview

Nomad is an easy-to-use, flexible, and performant workload orchestrator that deploys:

• Containers
• Non-containerized applications
• Virtual machines

Nomad enables developers to use declarative infrastructure-as-code for deploying their applications (jobs). Nomad uses bin packing to efficiently schedule jobs and optimize for resource utilization. Nomad is supported on macOS, Windows, and Linux.

Nomad is widely adopted and used in production by PagerDuty, CloudFlare, Roblox, Pandora, and more.

• Deploy Containers and Legacy Applications: Nomad’s flexibility as an orchestrator enables an organization to run containers, legacy, and batch applications together on the same infrastructure. Nomad brings core orchestration benefits to legacy applications without needing to containerize via pluggable task drivers.

• Simple & Reliable: Nomad runs as a single binary and is entirely self contained - combining resource management and scheduling into a single system. Nomad does not require any external services for storage or coordination. Nomad automatically handles application, node, and driver failures. Nomad is distributed and resilient, using leader election and state replication to provide high availability in the event of failures.

• Device Plugins & GPU Support: Nomad offers built-in support for GPU workloads such as machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI). Nomad uses device plugins to automatically detect and utilize resources from hardware devices such as GPU, FPGAs, and TPUs.

• Federation for Multi-Region, Multi-Cloud: Nomad was designed to support infrastructure at a global scale. Nomad supports federation out-of-the-box and can deploy applications across multiple regions and clouds.

• Proven Scalability: Nomad is optimistically concurrent, which increases throughput and reduces latency for workloads. Nomad has been proven to scale to clusters of 10K+ nodes in real-world production environments.

• HashiCorp Ecosystem: Nomad integrates seamlessly with Terraform, Consul, Vault for provisioning, service discovery, and secrets management.

Getting Started

Get started with Nomad quickly in a sandbox environment on the public cloud or on your computer.

• Local
  • Via Vagrant
• AWS
  • Via Terraform
• Azure
  • Via Terraform
• GCP
  • Via Terraform

These methods are not meant for production.

Documentation & Guides

Documentation is available on the Nomad website here. Guides are available on HashiCorp Learn website here.

Resources

• Website
  • www.nomadproject.io
• Mailing List
  • Google Groups
• Gitter
  • Nomad Chat Room

Who Uses Nomad

• Roblox
  • How Roblox built a platform for 100 million players with Nomad (2020)
  • How Roblox runs a platform for 70 million gamers on Nomad (2019)
• Cloudflare
  • How We Use HashiCorp Nomad (2020)
• BetterHelp
  • How the world's largest online therapy provider runs on Nomad (2020)
• Navi Capital
  • How Nomad powers a $1B hedge fund in Brazil (2020)
• Trivago
  • Maybe You Don’t Need Kubernetes (2019)
  • Nomad - Our Experiences and Best Practices (2019)
• Reaktor
  • Nomad: Kubernetes, but without the complexity (2019)
• Pandora
  • How Pandora Uses Nomad (2019)
• CircleCI
  • How CircleCI Processes 4.5 Million Builds Per Month (2019)
  • Security & Scheduling are Not Your Core Competencies (2018)
• Q2
  • Q2’s Nomad Use and Overview (2019)
• Citadel
  • End-to-End Production Nomad at Citadel (2017)
  • Extreme Scaling with HashiCorp Nomad & Consul (2016)
• Deluxe Entertainment
  • How Deluxe Uses the Complete HashiStack for Video Production (2018)
• Jet.com (Walmart)
  • Driving down costs at Jet.com with HashiCorp Nomad (2017)
• PagerDuty
  • PagerDuty’s Nomadic Journey (2017)
• SAP Ariba
  • HashiCorp Nomad @ SAP Ariba (2018)
• Target
  • Nomad at Target: Scaling Microservices Across Public and Private Clouds (2018)
  • Playing with Nomad from HashiCorp (2017)
• Oscar Health
  • Scalable CI at Oscar Health with Nomad and Docker (2018)
• eBay
  • HashiStack at eBay: A Fully Containerized Platform Based on Infrastructure as Code (2018)
• Dutch National Police
  • Going Cloud-Native at the Dutch National Police (2018)
• N26
  • Tech at N26 - The Bank in the Cloud (2018)
• Elsevier
  • Eslevier’s Container Framework with Nomad, Terraform, and Consul (2017)
• Graymeta
  • Backend Batch Processing At Scale with Nomad (2017)
• NIH NCBI
  • NCBI’s Legacy Migration to Hybrid Cloud with Consul & Nomad (2018)
• imgix
  • Cluster Schedulers & Why We Chose Nomad Over Kubernetes (2017)

...and more!

Contributing

See the contributing directory for more developer documentation.

Developing with Vagrant

A development environment is supplied via Vagrant to make getting started easier.

1. Install Vagrant
2. Install Virtualbox
3. Bring up the Vagrant project

   $ git clone https://github.com/hashicorp/nomad.git
   $ cd nomad
   $ vagrant up
   

The virtual machine will launch, and a provisioning script will install the needed dependencies within the VM.

Developing without Vagrant

1. Install Go 1.15.5+ (Note: gcc-go is not supported)
2. Clone this repo

   $ git clone https://github.com/hashicorp/nomad.git
   $ cd nomad
   

3. Bootstrap your environment

   $ make bootstrap
   

4. (Optionally) Set a higher ulimit, as Nomad creates many file handles during normal operations

   $ [ "$(ulimit -n)" -lt 1024 ] && ulimit -n 1024
   

5. Verify you can run tests

   $ make test
   

Running a development build

1. Compile a development binary (see the UI README to include the web UI in the binary)

   $ make dev
   # find the built binary at ./bin/nomad
   

2. Start the agent in dev mode

   $ sudo bin/nomad agent -dev
   

3. (Optionally) Run Consul to enable service discovery and health checks
   1. Download Consul
   2. Start Consul in dev mode

      $ consul agent -dev
      

Compiling Protobufs

If in the course of your development you change a Protobuf file (those ending in .proto), you'll need to recompile the protos.

1. Install Buf
2. Compile Protobufs

   $ make proto
   

Building the Web UI

See the UI README for instructions.

Create a release binary

To create a release binary:

$ make prerelease
$ make release
$ ls ./pkg

This will generate all the static assets, compile Nomad for multiple platforms and place the resulting binaries into the ./pkg directory.

API Compatibility

Only the api/ and plugins/ packages are intended to be imported by other projects. The root Nomad module does not follow semver and is not intended to be imported directly by other projects.