consul-template VS Nomad

The Hashicorp corporation has made a huge impact in providing valuable tools and platforms in the cloud ecosystem. The advantage of using the tools they provide, such as Terraform, Vault, and Packer, is that they all have the same language, Hashicorp Configuration Language (HCL). This means you can easily pick up any of these tools by learning HCL, which is similar to JSON. This approach can be useful when choosing tools to learn or use for a project.

Terraform is an open-source infrastructure as a code tool. It is designed by HashiCorp and written in Go Programming Language. Terraform is used to automate the creation of DevOps infrastructure and tasks. Terraform provisions and configures your DevOps infrastructure. It spins up new servers, creates load balancers, and node groups, and performs network configurations. Terraform is mostly applied to provision resources on cloud providers like AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. It can automate and provision infrastructure on any cloud platform. We will use Terraform to set up an Azure Kubernetes Service Cluster that has all the necessary cloud resources.

It can be time-consuming to create and manage the infrastructure that drives your software applications as they grow and become larger. Also, what about ongoing updates and releases of new features? Luckily, there is a solution to this problem in the form of a tool designed by Hashicorp called Terraform. This allows us to define our infrastructure in a central configuration file without having to create it on every provider platform we use.

HashiCorp Sentinel: Sentinel is a PAC tool developed by HashiCorp that can be used in tools such as Terraform, Vault, and Nomad. Sentinel supports writing rules in programming languages such as HCL to automate the enforcement of security and compliance policies.

Terraform is an infrastructure as code tool (IAC) created by HashiCorp that lets you automate cloud and on-prem resources. It uses configuration files written in HashiCorp Configuration Language (HCL) to declare resources (infrastructure objects) and define dependencies between them. To put it simply, this tool allows you to write a few configuration files and build a whole system’s architecture on the cloud by running a couple of commands. I found this to be a more efficient alternative to clicking through a console to create resources manually.

It was clear back in 2021 that Lob needed to consolidate how we run code and none of our current tools were up to the task; it wasn’t a matter of if Lob would upgrade to something new, but when. The Platform team kicked off a research project to find Lob’s next service platform. Forever ago (back in 2019) we investigated migrating to Kubernetes, a popular but notoriously difficult-to-manage tool for this sort of thing, but that project fizzled out for many reasons, forcing us to consider something else. We chose Nomad which offers a comparable feature set to Kubernetes in a much more streamlined package. Nomad is developed by HashiCorp, a leader in the DevOps space, and is used by companies like Pandora, Cloudflare, Internet Archive, and Roblox.

If however, you have an application service that needs support for 2+ ports, because you know, Kubernetes supports this, I would recommend avoiding Consul Connect, as it is not functional to meet minimum requirements for a service mesh. Perhaps someday, when Hashicorp prioritizes basic functionality and usability in future version, this product can be considered.

Looks a lot like Hashicorp (a technology company), maybe too similar, and not particularly evocative IMO.

AWS VPC is a simple example. This feature really shines when building reusable infrastructure-as-code for Network Firewall or even Network ACLs. Anything that simplifies something and reduces or eliminates any hacks required to reach a logical outcome is super valuable. Great work finally driving this one home HashiCorp.

I don't have any further insight, but looking at <https://github.com/hashicorp/nomad/forks?include=active&page...> coughed up https://github.com/atlassian/nomad/branches although confusingly it says "updated last week" but browsing any one of the branches seems to be stupid old so I got nothing

Finding conceptual forks, e.g. $(git push --mirror ...) would be trickier but I bet sourcegraph could do it

Ultimately, the question boils down to: what risk are you driving down: hitching your wagon to a dead stack, not getting security updates, not getting PRs merged, $other?

In previous post, we discussed creating a basic Nomad cluster in the Vultr cloud. Here, we will use the cluster created to deploy a load-balanced sample web app using the service discovery capability of Nomad and its native integration with the Traefik load balancer. The source code is available here for the reference.

Nomad is really awesome!

I only heard of this today, but it looks really interesting. It seems to finally get Kubernetes a bit closer to something like https://www.nomadproject.io/ in terms of complexity to install and operate.

In the rapidly evolving landscape of container orchestration and management, two prominent players have emerged: Kubernetes and HashiCorp's Nomad. While Kubernetes has gained widespread adoption and popularity, Nomad provides a compelling alternative that stands out for its simplicity and efficiency. In this blog post, we'll explore the advantages of using Nomad over Kubernetes and why it might be the right choice for certain use cases.

I can't discern how many are just those "dependabot" bumps but the 1400 forks show some are active https://github.com/hashicorp/nomad/forks?include=active&page... including CircleCI who I would think have a stake in a libre Nomad https://github.com/circleci/nomad/tree/circleci/release-1.5....

Now maybe their goals don't align with the community, and/or they don't want to be in the maintainer business for such a project, but better than nothing

Could this be a solution? nomad

It worth noting that Nomad UI(a official web admin panel) has log tailing utility built-in so maybe partial work has already been done. The developers may have other concerns.

The related issue is https://github.com/hashicorp/nomad/issues/10220

While I do understand the reasoning in their FAQ on the subject (https://www.hashicorp.com/license-faq). I however failed to noticed those intentions in their license text (https://github.com/hashicorp/nomad/commit/b3e30b1dfa185d9437...).

Specifically the part in FAQ which says "internal production use is fine", but then license says that "non-production use only" and then "You may make production use of the Licensed Work, provided such use does not include offering the Licensed Work to third parties on a hosted or embedded basis which is competitive with HashiCorp's products.".

IANAL, but even to me this statement is full loopholes. WHO do we consider 3rd party? WHAT do we consider "hosted or embedded basis"? WHEN do we consider it "competitive with Hashicorps products"?