github.com/zoomfoo/nomad@v0.8.5-0.20180907175415-f28fd3a1a056/website/source/intro/use-cases.html.markdown (about) 1 --- 2 layout: "intro" 3 page_title: "Use Cases" 4 sidebar_current: "use-cases" 5 description: |- 6 This page lists some concrete use cases for Nomad, but the possible use cases 7 are much broader than what we cover. 8 --- 9 10 # Use Cases 11 12 This page lists Nomad's core use cases. Please note that the full range of potential 13 use cases is much broader than what is currently covered here. Reading through the 14 [Introduction to Nomad](/intro/index.html) is highly recommended before diving into 15 the use cases. 16 17 ## Docker Container Management 18 19 Organizations are increasingly moving towards a Docker centric workflow for 20 application deployment and management. This transition requires new tooling 21 to automate placement, perform job updates, enable self-service for developers, 22 and to handle failures automatically. Nomad supports a [first-class Docker workflow](/docs/drivers/docker.html) 23 and integrates seamlessly with [Consul](/guides/operations/consul-integration/index.html) 24 and [Vault](/guides/operations/vault-integration/index.html) to enable a complete solution 25 while maximizing operational flexibility. Nomad is easy to use, can scale to 26 thousands of nodes in a single cluster, and can easily deploy across private data 27 centers and multiple clouds. 28 29 ## Legacy Application Deployment 30 31 A virtual machine based application deployment strategy can lead to low hardware 32 utlization rates and high infrastructure costs. While a Docker-based deployment 33 strategy can be impractical for some organizations or use cases, the potential for 34 greater automation, increased resilience, and reduced cost is very attractive. 35 Nomad natively supports running legacy applications, static binaries, JARs, and 36 simple OS commands directly. Workloads are natively isolated at runtime and bin 37 packed to maximize efficiency and utilization (reducing cost). Developers and 38 operators benefit from API-driven automation and enhanced reliability for 39 applications through automatic failure handling. 40 41 ## Microservices 42 43 Microservices and Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) are a design paradigm in 44 which many services with narrow scope, tight state encapsulation, and API driven 45 communication interact together to form a larger solution. However, managing hundreds 46 or thousands of services instead of a few large applications creates an operational 47 challenge. Nomad elegantly integrates with [Consul](/guides/operations/consul-integration/index.html) 48 for automatic service registration and dynamic rendering of configuration files. Nomad 49 and Consul together provide an ideal solution for managing microservices, making it 50 easier to adopt the paradigm. 51 52 ## Batch Processing Workloads 53 54 As data science and analytics teams grow is size and complexity, they increasingly 55 benefit from highly performant and scalable tools that can run batch workloads with 56 minimal operational overhead. Nomad can natively run batch jobs, [parameterized](https://www.hashicorp.com/blog/replacing-queues-with-nomad-dispatch) jobs, and [Spark](https://github.com/hashicorp/nomad-spark) 57 workloads. Nomad's architecture enables easy scalability and an optimistically 58 concurrent scheduling strategy that can yield [thousands of container deployments per 59 second](https://www.hashicorp.com/c1m). Alternatives are overly complex and limited 60 in terms of their scheduling throughput, scalability, and multi-cloud capabilities. 61 62 **Related video**: [End to End Production Nomad at Citadel](https://www.youtube.com/watch?reload=9&v=ZOBcGpGsboA) 63 64 ## Multi-region and Multi-cloud Deployments 65 66 Nomad is designed to natively handle multi-datacenter and multi-region deployments 67 and is cloud agnostic. This allows Nomad to schedule in private datacenters running 68 bare metal, OpenStack, or VMware alongside an AWS, Azure, or GCE cloud deployment. 69 This makes it easier to migrate workloads incrementally and to utilize the cloud 70 for bursting. 71 72