Nomad

Nomad is a workload orchestrator developed by HashiCorp that deploys and manages both containerized and non-containerized applications across on-premises and cloud environments. Unlike Kubernetes, Nomad runs any executable binary, Java application, isolated fork-exec process, or Docker container through its pluggable task driver system, without requiring a separate container runtime. The scheduler handles service, batch, system, and parameterized job types with built-in support for rolling updates, canary deployments, and automatic rescheduling on node failure. Job specifications are written in HashiCorp Configuration Language, defining task groups, resources constraints, network modes, and placement constraints with affinities and anti-affinities. Multi-region, multi-datacenter federation connects Nomad clusters across geographic regions under a single administrative plane. Integration with Consul provides service discovery, health checking, and service mesh capabilities including mutual TLS between services. Integration with Vault delivers secrets management with dynamic credential generation and automatic rotation for databases, cloud provider credentials, and internal PKI certificates. Nomad Pack enables reusable job templates. ACL policies with Sentinel integration enforce fine-grained governance and compliance rules. Traffic encryption covers both UDP gossip and TCP API and RPC communication. Recent tutorials demonstrate running AI workloads including IBM Granite language models through Ollama with Open WebUI on Nomad clusters. Enterprise features include multi-cluster federation, namespaces, resource quotas, and Sentinel policy-as-code governance. Open source under the MPL 2.0 license with a commercial Enterprise edition.