HashiCorp Nomad Workload Orchestrator

Nomad is a workload orchestrator developed by HashiCorp for deploying and managing containerized and non-containerized applications across clusters of servers. HashiCorp was founded in 2012 by Mitchell Hashimoto and Armon Dadgar in San Francisco, California. Went public on Nasdaq in December 2021 (ticker: HCP). Nomad was first released in 2015 and is used by CERN, Citadel, Roblox, and Target. Key features: simple architecture: single binary that runs as a server or client agent. No external dependencies. Gossip protocol for cluster membership. Multi-workload: schedule and manage Docker containers, Java applications (via JVM), isolated exec, QEMU virtual machines, and raw binaries. Not limited to containers. Bin packing and spread scheduling: efficient resource utilization with bin packing (pack tasks tightly) or spread (distribute evenly) strategies. Constraint-based placement using attributes and metadata. Task groups: define groups of tasks that run together on the same client. Shared resources and network namespace. Services: register tasks as services for service discovery. Native integration with Consul for service mesh and health checking. Multi-datacenter and multi-region: federate clusters across data centers and regions. Cross-region job scheduling. ACL: role-based access control with policies for namespaces, jobs, nodes. Multi-tenancy with namespaces. Job specifications: declarative job files in HCL or JSON. Define task groups, tasks, resources, constraints, update strategies. Rolling updates, canary deployments, blue-green deployments. Vault integration: native integration with HashiCorp Vault for secrets management. Nomad Autoscaler: horizontal and vertical autoscaling. Sentinel: policy-as-code for governance. Go. BSL.