How we use HashiCorp Nomad

In this blog post, we will walk you through the reliability model of services running in our more than 200 edge cities worldwide. Then, we will go over how deploying a new dynamic task scheduling system, HashiCorp Nomad, helped us improve the availability of services in each of those data centers, covering how we deployed Nomad and the challenges we overcame along the way. Finally, we will show you both how we currently use Nomad and how we are planning on using it in the future.

Reliability model of services running in each data center

For this blog post, we will distinguish between two different categories of services running in each data center:

• Customer-facing services: all of our stack of products that our customers use, such as caching, WAF, DDoS protection, rate-limiting, load-balancing, etc.
• Management services: software required to operate the data center, that is not in the direct request path of customer traffic.

Customer-facing services

The reliability model of our customer-facing services is to run them on all machines in each data center. This works well as it allows each data center’s capacity to scale dynamically by adding more machines.

Scaling is especially made easy thanks to Continue reading