I always search for mentions of Hashicorp Nomad in the comments section of front-page Kubernetes articles like this. There are often few or no mentions, so I’d like to add a plug for the Hashistack.

For some reason Nomad seems to get noticeably less publicity than some of the other Hashicorp offerings like Consul, Vault, and Terraform. In my opinion Nomad is right up there with them. The documentation is excellent. I haven’t had to fix any upstream issues in about a year of development on two separate Nomad clusters. Upgrading versions live is straightforward, and I rarely find myself in a situation where I can’t accomplish something I envisioned because Nomad is missing a feature. It schedules batch jobs, cron jobs, long running services, and system services that run on every node. It has a variety of job drivers outside of Docker.

Nomad, Consul, Vault, and the Consul-aware Fabio load balancer run together to form most of what one might need for a cluster scheduler based deployment, somewhat reminiscent of the “do one thing well” Unix philosophy of composability.

Certainly it isn’t perfect, but I’d recommend it to anyone who is considering using a cluster scheduler but is apprehensive about the operational complexity of the more widely discussed options such as Kubernetes.