Nomad: The 'not-so-obvious' choice for service orchestration
Pros
- Nomad is incredibly simple by nature, following the Linux philosophy of doing one thing great. That one thing for Nomad is job scheduling.
- Nomad is a modern tool, written in Go with a large community and maintained by HashiCorp.
- Implementation of Nomad is very simple since it is a single binary.
Cons
- Nomad only handles one part of a full platform. Expertise and vision are required in implementing an entire system that is functional enough for an organization to rely on. This includes other tools to handle things like secrets, service discovery, network routing, etc.
- Nomad is delayed in some modern functionality, like features for service-mesh and open tracing. These features are on the tool's roadmap, but there's currently no native support. These paradigms can be established still, but require more expertise outside of Nomad itself.
- Nomad is not the leading tool for this space, and as such risks being left behind by tools with much greater support, such as Kubernetes.
Return on Investment
- Nomad has allowed our organization to deploy quicker and more frequently with a lower failure rate.
- Nomad has brought in consistency from an operations perspective.
- Nomad's performance allows us to scale infinitely while providing functionality that reduces mean time to repair (canary deploys, versioning, rollbacks, etc).
Other Software Used
Consul, HashiCorp Vault, Terraform
