HashiCorp announced version 1.0 Beta of Nomad - their orchestration framework for deploying and managing containerized and non-containerized applications.
Nomad was introduced in 2015. Nomad's last release - 0.9 - focused on improving its scheduling features as well on its plugin architecture. The key features in the 1.0 release include support for HashiCorp Configuration Language (HCL) v 2, Dynamic application sizing, and namespace support in the OSS version.
Nomad supports different types of schedulers for different kinds of jobs. Nomad was "very focused on being a cluster scheduler", says Mitchell Hashimoto, founder and CTO of HashiCorp, and this probably explains why some users find it less complex to manage and use than Kubernetes. Some organizations have found this to be true if the comparison is with on-premise Kubernetes. Nomad supports non-container application workloads, which Kubernetes does not. However, compared to Nomad, Kubernetes has a larger ecosystem of tools. Nomad is used at many organizations for workload scheduling including Cloudflare, Autodesk, N26, Bowery, and Roblox.
In version 1.0, Dynamic Application Sizing - an enterprise Nomad feature - provides resource requirement recommendations for applications to mitigate resource (CPU/RAM) wastage. The configuration is part of Nomad's autoscaling configuration. Cluster autoscaling in Nomad is a recent feature. The application sizing policy can be tuned by using various strategies - and it "right-sizes" application resources based on analysis of historical data.
This version of Nomad also comes with HCL2 support, the configuration language used by other HashiCorp products like Terraform. The UI supports a "topology view" where data centers and nodes can be viewed with their resource capacities and how applications are distributed across them. Additionally, Namespaces - which enable multi-tenancy and were previously available only in the enterprise version of Nomad - are now part of the open-source version.
Nomad integrates well with other HashiCorp products like Consul and Vault. Nomad can use Consul to provide clustering and service discovery, but it's unclear which other non-HashiCorp tools are supported for these distributed features.
Other features in the 1.0 Beta release are events streams to view control plane events from different levels in a single place, Container Networking Interface (CNI) improvements, and support for Consul namespaces.
Nomad is open source and the source code is available on GitHub. The managed Nomad service is part of HashiCorp's Cloud Platform offering.