Created on 2020-07-16 07:14
Published on 2020-07-16 07:22
The Application: Nomad
In March 2013, a revolutionary developmental invention took place, changing the way of application deployment for everyone, making It way easier not only on the developer side but also for users. The Docker soon had many competing container deployment technologies, which followed through. This created confusion and a gap which one to choose. As this process of deployment, whether it is application container deployment or legacy application, is already complicated and time-consuming, Hashicorp recognized this space and came up with a workload job scheduler. They named it NomadNomad.
The primary purpose of the workload distributers is to provide companies with a quick ratio of deploying applications and increasing the density of resources simultaneously. The way it does that is not very complicated on the paper. A workload scheduler distributes applications on a broad spectrum, separating the applications from the infrastructure—enabling multiple applications per host instead of just one per host. Infrastructural utilization sees a significant increase as the infrastructure used more efficiently; hence the costs decrease drastically. There are three primary purposes are expected to be served by the workload schedulers:
· To serve the application deployment need of multiple developer teams at the same time.
· Putting those applications on a universal infrastructural system
· enabling cluster-wide applications self-healing and management capabilities.
This article is all about the said tool, a brief look into its features, and the installation process. Also, we will be taking a look at the advantages and disadvantages that comes in your way by using Nomad by Hashicorp.
Features:
Nomad is a flexible workload distributor/orchestrator with the ability to deploy containerized, legacy, batch, and multiple mixtures of microservices. Some of the key features are:
Straightforward and to rely on:
Nomad offers the combination of resource management and scheduling in a single 35Mb binary system. Nomad is capable of handling driver failures, nodes, and applications without any need for external storage of coordination services. The availability of leader election and state replication in any failure of events makes NomadNomad entrusted and reliable.
Containers and legacy application deployment:
Nomad enables an organization to utilize the infrastructure at fullest to run a batch, containers, and legacy applications. When using NomadNomad, it can deploy legacy applications through task drivers without the necessity of containerization
Multiple cloud and region federation:
Support for the infrastructure at a universal scale regardless of the regions and clouds. Nomad federation support can deploy jobs at a wide-spectrum.
Support for GPU and Device Plugins:
GPU workloads like ML and AI have built-in support provided by NomadNomad. For devices like GPU, TPU's, and FGPAs, It automatically detects and makes the use of recourses offered by hardware resulting in making a significant increase in the efficiency of the infrastructure fleet.
Integration with Hashicorp products:
The integration of NomadNomad with other Hashicorp products like Consul, terraform, and the vault is seamless.
Evident Scalability:
Nomad is widely known to handle the scalability of 10k+ cluster nodes in real-time production scenarios. It increases the throughput and a reduction in latency for the workloads.
How to Setup nomad for the development environment?
There two natural methods to get NomadNomad set up for the development environment.
By downloading and installing, the binaries (precompiled)
Or
By mounting directly from the source.
Binaries Download and installation:
1. Download the suitable binary package for as per your system. (it will be a zip file)
2. Unzip the file into your desired directory.
3. Copy it and put it anywhere in your system.
The material you get from unzipping the file is all you need to run NomadNomad. No additional files are required.
As for the other method, which is installing from source, you can have all you need here with commands for the CMD interface.
Advantages Vs. Disadvantages
Advantages/Pros:
Autoscaling features:
Nomad Hashicorp's new release, version 0.11, will provide support for autoscaling the horizontal cluster, adding the cluster infrastructure recourses is necessary. The latest version also offers vertical application autoscaling by dynamically adding and removing instances of applications. For now, this feature is available and intended to be used for containers.
Bin Packaging:
Nomad runs on the bin packaging algorithm. In bin packaging algorithm tasks continue to be assigned to a node until the machine reaches its maximum capacity. Because of the maximum number of allocation of the jobs to a node, the probability of full utilization of the node’s capacity is ensured. This makes it easy to shut down the non-working/unnecessary machines, and if a task needs to be assigned that needs a large number of resources, it is easy to locate a node with the necessary resources
Integrations with Hashicorp ecosystem:
Nomad's natural and beneficial integrations with the other hashicorp products seem very healthy. You can integrate it with the other hashicorp and 3rd party tools as per your requirement, the integrations supported by Nomad are:
· Built-in Integration with Consul
· Built-in support Hashicorp sentinel
· Built-in Integration with Vault
· Docker
· Habitat
· Portworx
Some other pros of using Nomad are:
· Nomad can orchestrate applications regardless of their type. (Legacy, container, batch)
· Support for Java, VM’s and Windows
· Supports global federation (multiple regions and clouds)
· Shared state Scheduler (allows all the servers to work parallel in making decisions for scheduling )
Dis-advantages/Cons:
Setting up the dedicated quota for NomadNomad in shared resources:
It is an important task to ensure the resources used by the NomadNomad do not disrupt any other services running on the same system. As one of the shared resources on any machine is Disk space, NomadNomad does not come with built-in support to set up a quota for its use. Users have to achieve this by isolating the nomad directory for data to a fixed-size mount point on every machine and make it dedicated for NomadNomad specifically.
Need for the use of Consul for production Environment:
As it is said everywhere, NomadNomad is one binary, but for the production environment, the Nomad is close to nothing without Consul. The users have to use Consul's template language to keep the tracks of any changes in the nomad production environment, and this adds up complexities in utilizing NomadNomad.