Overview
I've been using Nomad and Consul for the last year, and I'm extremely satisfied with Nomad compared to Openshift and K8S, especially for on-premise hosting with medium size systems. The simplicity of Nomad makes it attractive for small teams to get started in no time. I've used Service jobs, batch and recently raw_exec, the ease of use is incomparable. We were able to get 15 Redhat servers to deploy a microservice system using Jenkins and manage the environments easily, with very small number of developers, and this exact point of simplicity is the power of Hashicorp nomad and consul, and in my opinion simplicity would drive the market in the future of containers orchestration compared to the giant deliberately complex K8S.
But once the system has been deployed, I thought there is something missing, I want to see it alive! By alive I mean the real topology of the system with traffic estimation.
So I thought maybe I can give it a shot! and I wrote the LiteArch Trafik, a very simple traffic estimator that uses the power of Nomad to deploy itself to the cluster; Trafik tries at its best to give a visualization of the Nomad cluster nodes and services.
It's very simple that I was able to write most of it in 3 weeks. Yet, it's so powerful and fun to see your system services forming alive network appealing graph.
LA Trafik should is designed with the following guidelines in mind:
- Needs to leverage Nomad, Consul powerful APIs
- Will support only Linux-Based Servers (It's been tested on Ubuntu Focal and Redhat Enterprise)
- Should be configurable as much as possible
- UI needs to be intuitive and self-explanatory