Nomad is different from the previous two solutions, as it is not focused solely on containers. It is a general-purpose orchestrator with support for Docker, Podman, Qemu Virtual Machines, isolated fork/exec, and several other task drivers. Nomad is a solution worth learning about if you want to gain some of the advantages of container orchestration without migrating your application to containers.
It is relatively easy to set up and integrates well with other HashiCorp products such as Consul for service discovery and Vault for secret management. Like Docker or Kubernetes, Nomad clients can run locally and connect to the server responsible for managing your cluster.
There are three job types available in Nomad:
- Service: A long-lived task that should not exit without manual intervention (for example, a web server or a database).
- Batch: A shorter-lived task that can complete within as little as a few minutes. If the batch job returns an exit code indicating an error, it is either...