HashiCorp Nomad API
HashiCorp Nomad's REST API enables programmatic scheduling, management, and monitoring of containerized and non-containerized workloads across a cluster, including job submission, allocation inspection, node management, and ACL-based access control.
Score Breakdown
⚙ Agent Friendliness
🔒 Security
ACL policies support fine-grained capability grants per namespace. Native Vault integration enables secrets injection into task environments. TLS mutual authentication is supported for inter-node communication.
⚡ Reliability
Best When
An agent needs to orchestrate diverse workloads (containers, binaries, JVM apps, batch jobs) across a cluster without the operational overhead of Kubernetes.
Avoid When
Your infrastructure is already standardized on Kubernetes and switching orchestrators would create more complexity than benefit.
Use Cases
- • Submit a new job spec to the cluster to deploy a containerized service, then poll allocation status until healthy
- • Inspect running allocations for a job to retrieve their logs, resource utilization, and current task states
- • Scale a job's task group up or down by updating the count field in response to load metrics detected by an agent
- • List all nodes in the cluster and their health status to identify degraded nodes that need maintenance
- • Stop and garbage-collect a batch job after its completion is confirmed, freeing cluster resources
Not For
- • Kubernetes-native ecosystems — Nomad has a different scheduling model and is not a drop-in Kubernetes replacement
- • Complex multi-tenant environments requiring Kubernetes RBAC, network policies, and rich ecosystem integrations
- • Teams that need the broad vendor support and tooling ecosystem that has grown around Kubernetes
Interface
Authentication
Nomad uses ACL tokens with associated policies that grant specific capabilities (submit-job, read-logs, etc.) on namespaces. Anonymous access can be enabled for read-only operations in trusted environments. Tokens are passed via X-Nomad-Token header.
Pricing
Self-hosted open-source is entirely free. Enterprise features require a HashiCorp license agreement.
Agent Metadata
Known Gotchas
- ⚠ Nomad uses a blocking query pattern with ?index= and ?wait= parameters for long-polling — polling without these will cause high CPU usage on both client and server
- ⚠ Job evaluation status 'complete' does not mean allocations are healthy — agents must separately check allocation and task states
- ⚠ Namespace support must be explicitly enabled; forgetting to include ?namespace= in queries returns only the default namespace silently
- ⚠ Log retrieval requires streaming the /v1/client/fs/logs endpoint against the specific client node hosting the allocation, not the server
- ⚠ ACL bootstrap is a one-time operation — losing the bootstrap token requires Vault integration or manual recovery
Alternatives
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Scores are editorial opinions as of 2026-03-07.