nomad/website/content/docs/use-cases.mdx

---
layout: intro
page_title: Use Cases
description: |-
  Learn about Nomad's core use cases, such as Docker container orchestration, legacy application deployment, microservices, batch processing workloads, and multi-cloud federated deployemnts.
---

# Use Cases

This page features Nomad's core use cases.

Note that the full range of potential use cases is broader than what is covered here.

## Docker container orchestration

Organizations are increasingly moving towards a Docker centric workflow for
application deployment and management. This transition requires new tooling
to automate placement, perform job updates, enable self-service for developers,
and to handle failures automatically. Nomad supports a [first-class Docker workflow](/nomad/docs/job-declare/task-driver/docker)
and integrates seamlessly with [Consul](/nomad/docs/networking/consul)
and [Vault](/nomad/docs/secure/vault) to enable a complete solution
while maximizing operational flexibility. Nomad is easy to use, can scale to
thousands of nodes in a single cluster, and can easily deploy across private data
centers and multiple clouds.

## Legacy application deployment

A virtual machine based application deployment strategy can lead to low hardware
utilization rates and high infrastructure costs. While a Docker-based deployment
strategy can be impractical for some organizations or use cases, the potential for
greater automation, increased resilience, and reduced cost is very attractive.
Nomad natively supports running legacy applications, static binaries, JARs, and
simple OS commands directly. Workloads are natively isolated at runtime and bin
packed to maximize efficiency and utilization (reducing cost). Developers and
operators benefit from API-driven automation and enhanced reliability for
applications through automatic failure handling.

## Microservices

Microservices and Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) are a design paradigm in
which many services with narrow scope, tight state encapsulation, and API driven
communication interact together to form a larger solution. However, managing hundreds
or thousands of services instead of a few large applications creates an operational
challenge. Nomad elegantly integrates with [Consul](/nomad/docs/networking/consul)
for automatic service registration and dynamic rendering of configuration files. Nomad
and Consul together provide an ideal solution for managing microservices, making it
easier to adopt the paradigm.

## Batch processing workloads

As data science and analytics teams grow in size and complexity, they increasingly
benefit from highly performant and scalable tools that can run batch workloads with
minimal operational overhead. Nomad can natively run batch jobs and [parameterized](https://www.hashicorp.com/blog/replacing-queues-with-nomad-dispatch) jobs.
Nomad's architecture enables easy scalability and an optimistically
concurrent scheduling strategy that can yield [thousands of container deployments per
second](https://www.hashicorp.com/c1m). Alternatives are overly complex and limited
in terms of their scheduling throughput, scalability, and multi-cloud capabilities.

## Multi-Region and multi-cloud federated deployments

Nomad is designed to natively handle multi-datacenter and multi-region deployments
and is cloud agnostic. This allows Nomad to schedule in private datacenters running
bare metal, OpenStack, or VMware alongside an AWS, Azure, or GCE cloud deployment.
This makes it easier to migrate workloads incrementally and to utilize the cloud
for bursting.

Nomad now enables [Proof Key for Code Exchange
(PKCE)](https://oauth.net/2/pkce/) by default for new or updated OIDC auth
methods.

## Company-specific use cases

This section features talks from companies on how they use Nomad to solve critical, real-world business objectives.

#### Cloudflare

- [How We Use HashiCorp Nomad (2020)](https://blog.cloudflare.com/how-we-use-hashicorp-nomad/)

#### BetterHelp

- [How the world's largest online therapy provider runs on Nomad (2020)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eN2ghrGpiUo)

#### Navi Capital

- [How Nomad powers a \$1B hedge fund in Brazil (2020)](https://www.hashicorp.com/blog/nomad-community-story-navi-capital/)

#### Trivago

- [Maybe You Don’t Need Kubernetes (2019)](https://endler.dev/2019/maybe-you-dont-need-kubernetes/)
- [Nomad - Our Experiences and Best Practices (2019)](https://tech.trivago.com/2019/01/25/nomad-our-experiences-and-best-practices/)

#### Lob.com

- [Hard pass Kubernetes, Hello Nomad! (2022)](https://www.lob.com/blog/alternative-to-kubernetes)

#### Behavox

- [Microservices Management in Behavox: Part 2 - Nomad (2023)](https://blog.behavox.engineering/microservices-management-in-behavox-part-2-nomad/)

#### Reaktor

- [Nomad - Kubernetes, but without the complexity (2019)](https://youtu.be/GkmyNBUugg8)

#### Pandora

- [How Pandora Uses Nomad (2019)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OsZeKTP2u98&t=2s)

#### CircleCI

- [How CircleCI Processes 4.5 Million Builds Per Month (2019)](https://stackshare.io/circleci/how-circleci-processes-4-5-million-builds-per-month)
- [Security & Scheduling are Not Your Core Competencies (2018)](https://www.hashicorp.com/resources/nomad-vault-circleci-security-scheduling)

#### PagerDuty

- [PagerDuty’s Nomadic Journey (2017)](https://www.hashicorp.com/resources/pagerduty-nomad-journey)

#### Q2

- [Q2’s Nomad Use and Overview (2019)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OsZeKTP2u98&feature=youtu.be&t=1499)

#### SAP

- [HashiCorp Nomad @ SAP Ariba (2018)](https://www.hashicorp.com/resources/nomad-community-call-core-team-sap-ariba)

#### Deluxe Entertainment

- [How Deluxe Uses the Complete HashiStack for Video Production (2018)](https://www.hashicorp.com/resources/deluxe-hashistack-video-production)

#### Citadel

- [End-to-End Production Nomad at Citadel (2017)](https://www.hashicorp.com/resources/end-to-end-production-nomad-citadel)
- [Extreme Scaling with HashiCorp Nomad & Consul (2016)](https://www.hashicorp.com/resources/citadel-scaling-hashicorp-nomad-consul)

#### Jet.com (Walmart)

- [Driving down costs at Jet.com with HashiCorp Nomad (2017)](https://www.hashicorp.com/resources/jet-walmart-hashicorp-nomad-azure-run-apps)

#### Target

- [Nomad at Target - Scaling Microservices Across Public and Private Clouds (2018)](https://www.hashicorp.com/resources/nomad-scaling-target-microservices-across-cloud)
- [Playing with Nomad from HashiCorp (2017)](https://danielparker.me/nomad/hashicorp/schedulers/nomad/)

#### Oscar Health

- [Scalable CI at Oscar Health with Nomad and Docker (2018)](https://www.hashicorp.com/resources/scalable-ci-oscar-health-insurance-nomad-docker)

#### eBay

- [HashiStack at eBay - A Fully Containerized Platform Based on Infrastructure as Code (2018)](https://www.hashicorp.com/resources/ebay-hashistack-fully-containerized-platform-iac)

#### Dutch National Police

- [Going Cloud-Native at the Dutch National Police (2018)](https://www.hashicorp.com/resources/going-cloud-native-at-the-dutch-national-police)

#### N26

- [Tech at N26 - The Bank in the Cloud (2018)](https://medium.com/insiden26/tech-at-n26-the-bank-in-the-cloud-e5ff818b528b)

#### Elsevier

- [Elsevier’s Container Framework with Nomad, Terraform, and Consul (2017)](https://www.hashicorp.com/resources/elsevier-nomad-container-framework-demo)

#### Graymeta

- [Backend Batch Processing At Scale with Nomad (2017)](https://www.hashicorp.com/resources/backend-batch-processing-nomad)

#### NIH NCBI

- [NCBI’s Legacy Migration to Hybrid Cloud with Consul & Nomad (2018)](https://www.hashicorp.com/resources/ncbi-legacy-migration-hybrid-cloud-consul-nomad)

#### imgix

- [Cluster Schedulers & Why We Chose Nomad Over Kubernetes (2017)](https://medium.com/@copyconstruct/schedulers-kubernetes-and-nomad-b0f2e14a896)