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Introduction

Our objective in these HashiCorp Validated Designs (HVD) is to give you prescriptive guidance based on our experience partnering with hundreds of organizations who have implemented Nomad Enterprise. We acknowledge that this field is complex, so we have distilled the most common and successful patterns for operating Nomad into this guide.

Prerequisites

Review HashiCorp's Cloud Operating Model(opens in new tab) which enables your organization to unlock the fastest path to value in a modern multi-cloud datacenter.

Note

This guide assumes that you have reviewed and implemented the following HVDs:

Objectives

You are implementing Nomad Enterprise to achieve your company's business and functional objectives. Below are the expected business benefits from implementing the recommendations detailed in this guide.

Business objectives

  1. Reduce time to market: This guide assists you in establishing a robust standard workflow for deploying and managing the lifecycle of hybrid/multi cloud application deployments. When implemented effectively, developers can deploy applications more efficiently, reducing the time it takes for your organization to introduce new products and features to the market.
  2. Consistent compliance: Through policy-as-code, organizations achieve compliant deployment flow, automate audit, and respond proactively to regulatory change.
  3. Improve skills and retention: Through deployment templates reuse, organizations reduce the cognitive load associated with onboarding new talent and retain that talent longer by improving productivity for team members.
  4. Optimize cloud cost: Achieve this by implementing a central shared service for application deployment. Standardize and enforce best practices by providing visibility into resources assigned to applications across the organization.

Functional objectives

  1. Adopt a mature golden workflow for application deployment.
  2. Enhance security posture.
  3. Improve traceability of actions and ensure audit readiness.

Onboarding/adoption checklist

Follow the tasks below to accomplish a successful onboarding and adoption process for Nomad Enterprise. The time taken to complete these varies depending on the complexity of your organization and the level of executive alignment. However, we have found that using HashiCorp Professional Services or partner-provided services accelerates the process.

Project checklist

  1. Identify key people from the Platform Team who own and operate Nomad. In your organization, the Platform Team may own the architecture but the Production Services/Support Team may own 24/7 day-to-day operations. Engage both teams at the outset.

  2. Identify key executives sponsoring this project.

  3. Establish a cadence call once a week/fortnight with the HashiCorp account team.

  4. Conduct a quarterly business review with sponsoring executives.

  5. We recommend that key platform team members attend HashiCorp Academy training. This training also enables the Platform Team as trainers for your organization.

  6. Train application teams either by the Platform Team "trainers" or attend free hands-on workshops offered by HashiCorp solution engineers and architects.

  7. Create a schedule for onboarding business units and/or application teams. We recommend for the adopt phase that you start with one or a handful of business units (see note below).

  8. Establish key milestones to track progress. We recommend the following key milestones:

    • Nomad onboarding.
    • Platform team enablement.
    • Application team early adopter enablement.
    • Application team early adopter onboarding.

Tip

Onboarding business units/application teams

HashiCorp recommends that you base the initial business unit/application team onboarding schedule on a representative set of early adopter teams with one or more of the following characteristics:

  • A high incentive to use Nomad application scheduling to achieve their goals.
  • Have a DevOps skill set.

Those characteristics increase the chances of success.

The schedule introduces around five teams in the first set, working with them from development to UAT. Introduce a second set of 10-20 teams into development. This second set would benefit from the feedback the more experienced first set provides as part of pipeline refinement.

When the first set has reached the production environment and the second set has reached UAT, introduce a third set of around 50-100 application teams into development. These benefit from the further refinement brought through feedback and collaboration with the first and second sets of teams. Through working with this third set, increased scale is both visible and demonstrable to senior management, standardizing, adding efficiency gains and cost savings and making project success highly likely.

Onboarding checklist

  1. Configure core Nomad Enterprise components.
    • Servers
    • Clients
    • Access control lists
    • Logs and metrics collection
  2. Establish a workflow to onboard application teams to Nomad Enterprise.
    • Deployment templates and best practices
    • Observability patterns
  3. Conduct initial discussions with the first set of early adopters regarding their experience. Update the project backlog with next step improvements.

Adoption checklist

  1. Determine the migration roadmap for existing applications.
  2. Establish a workflow for application teams.
  3. Complete a production readiness assessment with a HashiCorp solution architect.

Tip

We highly recommend arranging a meeting with a HashiCorp solution architect soon after acquiring your license. They offer essential architectural and integration guidance for your project.

Schedule another session within three months to ensure that the transition architecture and migration plans remain clear and unimpeded.

Regular meetings with your HashiCorp solution engineer throughout the project and into production are also advised to continually enhance business value.

Next

Initial Configuration