HashiCorp Nomad

Orchestrate containers, VMs, and standalone binaries with HashiCorp Nomad. Write HCL job specifications, manage rolling and canary deployments, configure autoscaling, and run batch, service, and system workloads across a cluster.

This skill helps you operate HashiCorp Nomad as a lightweight scheduler alternative to Kubernetes. It authors HCL job specs with groups, tasks, and drivers (docker, exec, java), manages rolling and canary deployments with update stanzas, sets up horizontal and cluster autoscaling, wires Consul for discovery and Vault for secrets, and runs batch, service, and system job types. It also covers constraints, affinities, and troubleshooting placement failures.

When to use

Use when working with HashiCorp Nomad — writing HCL job specs, rolling/canary deployments, autoscaling, task drivers, or running batch/service/system workloads across a cluster.

Examples

Docker service job

Deploy a container with health checks

Write a Nomad job spec that runs 3 instances of a Docker image on port 8080, registers the service in Consul with a health check, and does canary deployments with 1 canary and auto_promote

Batch job with constraints

Run a periodic task

Create a Nomad periodic batch job that runs nightly at 2am, uses a node constraint to only run on nodes with the 'gpu' meta attribute, and retries twice on failure