Nomad as an Orchestrator

Have you ever been to the theatre? Well if you look at how a show is run you can see all the technology elements of a show and you can see the complex rigging that is required to create that effect, all those various lights and speakers and smoke machines. Now in the old days, people might have operated each of those things manually, turning lights on one by one as required, but with the improvement of general technology available to crews, this is now less the case.

To run a show now, you set up all the equipment in the places it’s meant to be and you usually have most of the lights and sound at least connected to one desk so one person can operate all of it at once. Then you program the show: Scene One requires the blue light, then we add the red light, then turn them both off. In a decently equipped show, you shouldn’t notice someone turning that red light off then the blue one because they’ll be programmed, almost like a PowerPoint, so they go to the next action in the sequence encompassing the whole stage with one button press for each advancement.

This takes all of the manual labour out of each change in lighting etc so that all that is required is to know when to change, not what. So even if managing this requires more than one person each activation can be coordinated by one person (who is called the deputy stage manager, if you’re interested).

And that is what an orchestrator does, you define sets of tasks and you define when they are executed, across as many devices as you want (including across all sorts of operating environments and systems). Imagine you’re running several different environments (maybe a prod, dev and test) that while slightly different, need the same sort of actions being performed on them at the same time. Patching is an easy example of this, but it could be a wide array of tasks.

You can develop the job description with Nomad and then use it to push those same steps to the other environments in sequence, removing your manual overhead for each task. It also maintains a queue of tasks, basically allowing you to manage essentially a ticket system for your environment that’s completely automated. As it’s accessible through the command line, a web UI and an application programming interface (API), you should be able to find an easy way to integrate it into your workflow, especially if that workflow already includes other HashiCorp products, as they are designed to work together. Teamwork makes the dream work and all that.