HashiConf Digital June 2020: Nomad News in Review

It’s been a busy year for the HashiCorp Nomad team with releases packed full of some of our most requested features. In the first post of this two-part recap, I’ll reflect on the announcements and talks from HashiConf Digital June. In the second part, I’ll review some key features in Nomad 0.12 and share our team’s must-see highlights to prepare you for HashiConf Digital this upcoming October!

This past HashiConf in June had over 6,600 community members from 105 countries. Users tuned in for three days to hear product announcements, participate in product workshops, share ideas, and deepen their knowledge of HashiCorp products.

»Nomad 0.12 Announcement

Our opening Keynote featured an exciting Nomad 0.12 announcement. I couldn’t wait to explore two of those features: the Nomad Autoscaler and the new spread-based ranking algorithm.

The Nomad Autoscaler caught my attention because our community highly anticipated it. We added this feature to respond to demand on services, reduce manual work by automatically scaling based on defined metrics, and reduce waste of resources used by maximizing each worker node’s utilization. I was delighted to discover that implementing this feature was as minimal as adding the Autoscaler plugin and including a scaling stanza in the job file.

The new spread-based ranking algorithm prioritizes jobs for placement based on those that are least utilized. Typically, Nomad uses an algorithm to rank nodes and facilitate optimal placement of scheduled jobs by minimizing the number of nodes used. However, there are use cases that would benefit from a spreading strategy that ranks nodes based on those that are least utilized to keep utilization even across nodes, optimize for performance, reduce hot spots, and minimize the impact of node failure.

Check out the full list of features in the Nomad 0.12 beta.
To learn more about the other product announcements from our keynote, you can view the full opening keynote.

»Talks and Workshops

In addition to the opening keynote, we had various talks, workshops, and resources available to attendees on-demand.

HashiCorp Developer Nick Ethier’s “Nomad Networking Demystified” went under Nomad’s hood to teach about Networking. We continued the conversation around Nomad networking in a panel. Beyond networking, James Rassell discussed the Nomad Autoscaler and explained the different kinds of autoscaling, their use cases, and Nomad’s implementation.

If you want an opportunity to try our Nomad workshops from HashiConf Digital, check out our tutorial on how to deploy the Nomad UI in production. We also created a Learn tutorial highlighting how to secure Nomad jobs with Consul Connect. Check out our blog post for a full list of tutorials related to workshops.

»Conclusion

In the next of this two-part series, I’ll reflect on the announcements and releases that happened since HashiConf June.

Are you interested in all things Nomad? At HashiConf Digital this upcoming October, we will have announcements from HashiCorp engineers and product managers, as well as stories of Nomad at scale from Bowery Farming, CloudFlare, Q2, and Roblox.

Register now at hashiconf.com/digital-october!