hashicorp/nomad
Nomad
Nomad is a distributed workload orchestrator and infrastructure automation platform designed to manage the lifecycle of applications across large-scale, heterogeneous environments. It functions as a multi-cloud orchestration engine, providing a unified control plane to deploy, scale, and govern containers, virtual machines, and legacy applications. By utilizing declarative job specifications, the system ensures infrastructure convergence and maintains the desired state across distributed data centers and geographic regions.
The platform distinguishes itself through a flexible, plugin-based architecture that supports diverse execution drivers and specialized hardware, such as GPUs and FPGAs. It employs a hierarchical regional federation model, allowing organizations to manage independent clusters as a cohesive system while enforcing fine-grained security policies, resource quotas, and multi-tenancy through namespace segmentation. Its scheduling engine is built on a strongly consistent consensus protocol, ensuring high availability and fault tolerance even across complex, multi-cloud topologies.
Beyond core orchestration, the system provides comprehensive infrastructure governance, including integrated service discovery, secret management, and policy-as-code enforcement. It handles the full operational lifecycle of cluster nodes, from automated bootstrapping and health monitoring to rolling version upgrades and capacity scaling. The platform also offers deep observability through system metrics, audit logging, and reactive query mechanisms to maintain operational visibility.
Nomad is distributed as a single binary, supporting deployment patterns ranging from lightweight local development environments to massive, multi-region production clusters.
Features
- Workload Orchestration - Schedules and manages containerized, virtualized, and legacy applications across large-scale, multi-region infrastructure clusters.
- Infrastructure Automation - Provisions resources and deploys applications across heterogeneous environments using declarative job specifications.
- Multi-Cloud Orchestrators - Provides a control plane for federating and managing workloads across diverse on-premises and cloud-based infrastructure providers.
- Raft Consensus Implementations - Maintains a strongly consistent replicated state machine across server nodes to ensure cluster reliability.
- Service Discovery - Tracks the location and health of running services automatically to ensure reliable communication between distributed components.
- Secrets Management - Integrates with external secret stores to retrieve and inject secure credentials into running tasks.
- Application Lifecycle Management - Manages the deployment, updates, and termination of application jobs through declarative specifications.
- Declarative Reconciliation Engines - Continuously compares current cluster state against desired job specifications to drive automated infrastructure convergence.
- Cluster Management - Automates the lifecycle, health monitoring, and scaling of compute nodes within distributed data centers.
- Batch Processing Schedulers - Schedules high-throughput concurrent tasks and parameterized workloads for data analytics and background processing.
- Regional Federation Models - Organizes independent clusters into logical groupings to allow unified management and workload placement across geographic boundaries.
- Cluster Membership Protocols - Uses peer-to-peer communication to propagate cluster state and detect node failures across distributed infrastructure.
- High Availability Infrastructure - Ensures continuous operation through redundant server nodes and automatic failover within the cluster.
- Resource Isolation - Segments cluster resources into logical partitions to enforce multi-tenancy, security policies, and quota management.
- Policy-As-Code Engines - Enforces fine-grained operational and security rules on job submissions to ensure compliance with organizational standards.
- Access Control - Enforces administrative and operational permissions through policy-based access control and encrypted inter-cluster traffic.
- Namespace Isolation - Isolates jobs and associated objects into logical namespaces to prevent interference between users or environments.
- Service Discovery Registries - Maintains dynamic registries of service locations and health status to enable automated discovery.
- Cluster Upgrades - Orchestrates rolling server node upgrades to maintain cluster stability and service continuity during version transitions.
- High Availability Clusters - Ensures high availability and automatic failover by partitioning voting servers across defined failure domains.
- Cross-Cluster Federation - Links multiple independent clusters to enable cross-region job deployment and policy synchronization.
- Infrastructure Governance Policies - Enforces fine-grained security rules, resource quotas, and compliance standards using policy-as-code.
- Resource Quotas - Limits total compute and memory consumption of namespaces to prevent resource over-allocation.
- Infrastructure Provisioning - Automates the setup and configuration of compute resources and networking components required for cluster operations.
- Regional Routing - Directs API traffic to specific geographic data centers to balance workloads across distributed infrastructure.
- Service Meshes - Integrates network plugins to redirect service traffic through proxies for secure communication.
- Workload Placement Policies - Enables sophisticated scheduling constraints and node affinity rules to influence where workloads are placed across distributed clusters.
- Cluster Discovery Mechanisms - Integrates with service discovery tools to automatically form server clusters and secure inter-node communication.
- Service Mesh Networking - Tracks service location and health while enabling secure communication through service mesh and dynamic routing.
- Service Meshes - Facilitates service discovery and secure communication between distributed components using a dedicated networking layer.
- Access Tokens - Generates and manages secure tokens for programmatic API authorization and cluster access.
- Audit Logs - Records user-issued actions and API requests to provide operational traceability and security compliance.
- SSL/TLS Certificate Management - Configures certificates and keys to establish encrypted and verified communication channels for cluster security.
- Cluster Bootstrapping Mechanisms - Connects servers and clients into a cluster using manual configuration, cloud metadata, or service discovery.
- Plugin-Based Architectures - Supports diverse workload types by loading external binaries for containers, virtual machines, and legacy processes.
- Health Monitoring - Provides automated health checks for running tasks to ensure service availability and operational status.
- Cloud Native Infrastructure - Lightweight orchestrator for managing diverse workload deployments.
- Container Infrastructure - Cluster manager for long-lived services and batch processing workloads.
- Container Management - Cluster manager and scheduler.
- Container Orchestration - Flexible scheduler for deploying and managing applications.
- Cluster Lifecycle Management - Monitors cluster health and automatically removes failed servers to maintain quorum stability.
- Rolling Update Controllers - Manages rolling updates by defining concurrency and timing for task restarts to minimize downtime.
- Kernel Isolation Primitives - Restricts process access to system resources using kernel namespaces and control groups.
- Inter-Process Communication - Facilitates secure and efficient data exchange between cluster members using a typed protocol for internal operations.
- Identity Federation - Authenticates tasks with external cloud providers using standard identity tokens for secure cross-platform access.
- Administrative APIs - Provides programmatic interfaces for managing system operations and infrastructure configurations remotely.
- Metric and Performance Monitors - Collects and visualizes performance data from the orchestrator and managed workloads to ensure operational health.
- Consistency Tuning - Allows configuration of read consistency levels to balance performance and data accuracy requirements.
- Task and Device Drivers - Supports custom task drivers, device drivers, and storage providers to expand platform functionality.
- External Service Integrations - Connects workloads to external service discovery and secret management systems to automate networking and credential injection.
- Storage Volume Orchestration - Mounts external storage volumes to tasks using standardized interfaces to maintain data state across restarts.
- Deployment Simulators - Simulates job impacts against current cluster state to review scheduling decisions before application.
- Bin-Packing Schedulers - Provides automated sizing recommendations and bin packing algorithms to maximize hardware efficiency.
- Legacy Workload Support - Executes binaries and scripts directly on infrastructure to support non-containerized services.
- Network Configuration - Defines specific IP addresses and ports for internal RPC and gossip protocols to control node communication.
- Traffic Routing - Connects cluster services to external load balancers to manage and distribute incoming traffic.
- Hardware Acceleration - Detects and utilizes specialized hardware like GPUs and FPGAs through built-in device plugins.
- CI/CD Integrations - Connects external build and deployment tools to automate the lifecycle of workloads across infrastructure.
- Cluster Health Monitoring - Verifies server status against connectivity, consensus, and log synchronization metrics to ensure cluster reliability.
- Backup and Recovery - Captures atomic snapshots of server state for disaster recovery and persistence.
- Cluster Topology Management - Organizes infrastructure into logical regions and data centers to control workload placement.
- Query Filters - Refines data returned by API endpoints using server-side expressions to reduce network traffic.
- Non-Voting Read Replicas - Increases read throughput and offloads scheduling tasks by deploying non-voting servers that replicate cluster data.
- Container Shell Access - Provides interactive shell access to running containers for administrative tasks and debugging.
- Application Packaging - Templates and builds application configurations to standardize deployment patterns across environments.
- Remote Cluster Access - Interacts with remote workload orchestrators via environment variables or flags to manage infrastructure without local agents.
- Volume Mounts - Attaches host directories or devices into container filesystems to persist data or provide hardware access.
- Network Namespace Sharing - Shares network namespaces between containers to enable sidecar patterns and secure communication over localhost.
- Advertised Address Overrides - Publishes specific reachability addresses to peers to support complex network topologies like NAT.
