Blog | Nomad

In this series we explore how Nomad handles unexpected failures, outages, and routine maintenance of cluster infrastructure, often without operator intervention.

In this post we’ll explore how Nomad is designed to handle transient and permanent failures of both clients and servers gracefully to make it easy to run highly reliable infrastructure.

This is the third in a series Building Resilient Infrastructure with Nomad (Part 1, Part 2). In this series we explore how Nomad handles unexpected failures, outages, and routine maintenance of cluster infrastructure, often without operator intervention required.

In this post we’ll look at how Nomad adds resiliency to your computing infrastructure by providing a consistent workflow for managing the entire job lifecycle, including robust options for updating and migrating jobs that help minimize or even eliminate down time.

This is the second post in our series *Building Resilient Infrastructure with Nomad*. In this series we explore how Nomad handles unexpected failures, outages, and routine maintenance of cluster infrastructure, often without operator intervention required.

In this post we’ll look at how the Nomad client enables fast and accurate scheduling as well as self-healing through driver health checks and liveness heartbeats.

Welcome to our series on Building Resilient Infrastructure with Nomad, where we explore how Nomad handles unexpected failures, outages, and routine maintenance of cluster infrastructure, often without operator intervention required.

In this first post, we'll look at how Nomad automates the restart of failed and unresponsive tasks as well as reschedule of repeatedly failing tasks to other nodes.

HashiCorp Nomad 0.8 introduces advanced node draining to simplify cluster wide upgrades of Nomad client nodes. This post explores how HashiCorp Nomad’s improved draining features can be used to drain an existing workload from one set of nodes to a new set of nodes without downtime.

We are pleased to announce the release of HashiCorp Nomad 0.8. Version 0.8 enhances Nomad's cluster management features and reliability, helping to ensure a seamless operational experience as a growing number of enterprises adopt Nomad, move into production, and scale out.

It seems that containers are everywhere. They should be. They make it easier to deploy applications into environments for development, testing and in production. However, what about when containers just don’t work? To take full advantage of the container orchestration platforms currently available there has to be considerable changes made to the applications and the deployment processes. For green field applications this is not a problem as they are usually built with containers in mind. What do you do if you want to have the advantages of a container-like scheduler but for your legacy applications? Enter HashiCorp Nomad.

Apache Heron is a stream processing engine (SPE) open sourced by Twitter in 2016 and now currently in incubation under the auspices of the Apache Software Foundation. At Twitter, Heron was built to provide multi-tenancy, efficient resource usage, support for a variety of programming languages and APIs, operational simplicity at massive scale, and high productivity for developers building both real-time and batch services. Today, Heron serves the lion’s share of Twitter’s massive real-time processing needs, is used by numerous large enterprises, and has a thriving open source community.

As a core contributor to Heron, I’m excited to announce that Nomad is being added as a fully supported scheduler for Heron.

At HashiCorp, we’ve always said that all of our projects should work well separately, but better together. This is certainly true for HashiCorp Terraform and HashiCorp Nomad. Terraform provisions the infrastructure and Nomad schedules and deploys applications. When deploying Nomad, you may do this however you like, and the Nomad team strives to make that easy to do, but if you opt to use Terraform to manage the servers that Nomad runs on, we believe that should offer a first-class experience.

A lot of HashiCorp users and employees love our whole suite of products, but like with your grandmother, it’s almost impossible not to have one slight predilection over one of our creations (says the favorite grandchild). In my case, my predilection for HashiCorp Nomad is quite evident, to the point of being a running joke among the European team. I think not a single customer meeting goes by without someone saying "yeah, that’s Nomad, Nico’s favorite product…".

No one wants to manage storage, but high-value applications aren’t going to run without it. In an ideal world, storage would “just be there” without having to think about it --- or provision and manage it, right?

Portworx, a software-defined persistent storage solution for container workloads, provides a highly-available elastic data fabric. Portworx cloud native storage allows jobs to seamlessly run hyper-converged with the storage layer for best performance --- and also provides a rich spectrum of options for data availability.

OpenFaaS (or Functions as a Service) is a framework for building serverless functions but with containers. With OpenFaaS you can package any process or container as a serverless function for either Linux or Windows - just bring your Nomad cluster. The project focuses on ease of use through its UI and CLI which can be used to test and monitor functions in tandem with Prometheus enabling auto-scaling.

Guest post from Pavel Klushin, Solutions Architect at Spotinst.

Utilizing capacity in the cloud can save a lot of money, but taking advantage of those savings requires a lot of work. Spotinst, is a platform for running and managing elastic cloud compute and enables companies to reduce their compute infrastructure costs by 60-80%. HashiCorp Nomad provides easy-to-use and flexible cluster management and container scheduling. Nomad and Spotinst Elastigroup together allow you to efficiently deploy containerized workloads and easily manage clusters at any scale for a fraction of the cost.

We are pleased to announce the release of HashiCorp Nomad 0.7. Nomad is HashiCorp's lightweight and flexible cluster scheduler designed to easily integrate into your existing workflows. Nomad can run both microservice and batch workloads, and has first-class support for Docker as well as non-containerized applications.

Today at HashiConf 2017 in Austin, Texas, we announced major updates and new features across our entire suite of open source and enterprise products, including HashiCorp Terraform, HashiCorp Vault, HashiCorp Consul, and HashiCorp Nomad. In addition to these product updates, we announced the release of Sentinel, our new policy as code framework that integrates across the Enterprise product suite, and the Terraform Module Registry, which provides example infrastructure templates to make provisioning across cloud environments easier, and so much more.

This post explores how to use the Nomad Terraform provider to control the lifecycle of a Nomad service.

Both HashiCorp Nomad and Terraform allow you to declaratively define infrastructure as code, but they serve different functions in the organization. Nomad schedules and monitors applications, making sure the application stays running and automatically reconciles any failure. Nomad supports rolling deploys to deliver safer convergence. Nomad also integrates with Consul for service discovery and Vault for secrets management. Terraform, on the other hand, is a lifecycle management and provisioning tool. It creates, updates, and destroys the underlying infrastructure which Nomad will use to run applications. But Terraform is much more than a infrastructure tool - Terraform can also manage the process of submitting, updating, and deleting Nomad applications, which will allows modeling your entire infrastructure as code.

The Nomad Terraform provider is perfect for continuous delivery for your applications, and in this post we will look at how these tools work seamlessly together to enable this workflow.

Nomad provider for HashiCorp Terraform to run jobs with HashiCorp Nomad.

We are pleased to announce the release of HashiCorp Nomad 0.6. Nomad is a distributed, scalable, and highly available cluster manager and scheduler designed for both microservice and batch workloads.

Nomad 0.6 includes a number of new features focused on improving job management and configuration as well as many improvements and bug fixes. Highlights include:

Job deployments

Job history and ability to revert to older versions

Dynamic environment variables

Automatic advertisement of container IP addresses with HashiCorp Consul

We are also pleased to announce that the Nomad ecosystem now includes a version of Apache Spark that natively integrates Nomad as a Spark cluster manager and scheduler. See our Running Apache Spark on Nomad blog post for additional details.

Apache Spark is a popular data processing engine/framework that has been architected to use third-party schedulers. The schedulers that are available, however, involve a level of complexity that can be undesirable for many potential Spark users. To help fill this gap, we are pleased to announce that the HashiCorp Nomad ecosystem now includes a version of Apache Spark that natively integrates Nomad as a Spark cluster manager and scheduler.

In a previous post, we explored how HashiCorp Consul discovers other agents using cloud metadata to bootstrap a cluster. This post looks at HashiCorp Nomad's auto-joining functionality and how we can use Terraform to create an autoscaled cluster.

Continuing the momentum from the HashiCorp Vault and HashiCorp Consul Quick Start Guides (QSG) which have seen tremendous usage, we’ve partnered with the AWS team to build a QSG for HashiCorp Nomad.

We are pleased to announce the release of Nomad v0.5.5. This release includes

several new features, improvements, and bug fixes.

Nomad v0.5.3 introduced parameterized jobs which act as job scaffolds that can be dispatched on demand with configurable arguments. These jobs behave similar to functions, encapsulating the logic and allowing the caller to name the job and provide appropriate arguments. Nomad Dispatch treats those "function calls" like a future or promise, making it easy to build scalable processing pipelines for operations like video transcoding, image resizing, sending emails, or doing a billing rollup.

This blog post explores using the new Nomad Dispatch feature to build a video transcoding service using the popular open source tool ffmpeg. Traditional approaches to this problem often involve many different components for work queuing, scheduling, capacity planning, and failure handling. Due to its design, Nomad automatically handles these concerns, allowing for focus on a minimal job definition and the business logic of the video transcoding service.

We are pleased to announce the release of Nomad v0.5.3. This release includes several new features, improvements, and bug fixes.

We are pleased to announce the release of Nomad 0.5. Nomad is a distributed, scalable, and highly available cluster manager and scheduler designed for both microservice and batch workloads.

Nomad 0.5 includes a number of new features focused on increasing cluster security and enabling new workloads to be run on Nomad. Highlights include:

Vault Integration

Template Block

Sticky Volumes

Cluster Encryption

We've released Nomad 0.4. Nomad is a distributed, scalable and highly available cluster manager and scheduler designed for both microservice and batch workloads.

Nomad 0.4 ships a number of new features focused on improving the operational aspects of the tool. Highlights include:

Nomad Plan

Live Resource Utilization

Simpler Clustering

We are proud to announce the release of Nomad 0.3

Nomad is a distributed, scalable and highly available cluster manager and scheduler designed for both microservice and batch workloads.

This release introduces new features, hardens core components and improves UX

across the board on the path towards ensuring Nomad is ready to run in production. Feature highlights include:

Periodic Jobs

Log Rotation and File System APIs

Job Queues

Please see the full Nomad 0.3

CHANGELOG

Download Nomad 0.3 here

learn more about the major new features and improvements in Nomad 0.3.

CVE-2015-7547 was announced on the morning of February 16th. We would like to address HashiCorp users on how this affects any HashiCorp tooling.

We are proud to announce the release of Nomad 0.2

Nomad is a distributed, scalable and highly available cluster manager and scheduler designed for both microservice and batch workloads.

The initial public release of Nomad was almost two months ago and we have been

busy extending the system, improving user experience, and fixing bugs.

Nomad 0.2 brings many new features including service discovery, a system

scheduler, restart policies, new constraint types, numerous client improvements, and much more. Please see the full Nomad 0.2 CHANGELOG for more details.

Download Nomad 0.2 here

learn more about the major new features and improvements in Nomad 0.2.

Today we announce Nomad

scheduler designed for microservices and batch workloads. Nomad is distributed, highly available, and scales to thousands of nodes spanning multiple datacenters and regions.

Nomad provides a common workflow to deploy applications across an infrastructure.

Developers use a declarative job specification to define how an application should be deployed and the resources it requires (CPU, memory, disk). Nomad accepts these jobs and finds available resources to run them. The scheduling algorithm ensures all constraints are satisfied, and packs as many applications on a host as possible to optimize resource utilization. Additionally, Nomad supports virtualized, containerized, or standalone applications running on all major operating systems giving it the flexibility to support a broad range of workloads.

Nomad is now being deployed in production environments and we are proud to

share it publicly. We are excited about the future of the project, and are just beginning to build on the foundation that it provides.

Read on to learn more.