ACLs and the Garbage Collector

Nomad
1

I’ve been taking Nomad 1.0 beta for a spin, and I’m pretty glad namespaces have made it to the open source version. All of my users run batch jobs, and sometimes jobs fail when a user is iterating a lot. The main issue is that rerunning a batch job with the same name as a dead one results in the new job not running.

Previously, I have told my users about the curl command to invoke the garbage collector. With ACLs in place, this seems to no longer be an option, since they would need a management token. What I’d like to know is as follows.

  • Is there any way that I can allow users to run the garbage collector on a namespace they have write access to without handing them a management token?
  • Is there a way to force a batch job to be run again after modifying a job file without having to invoke the garbage collector?
  • Since “service” jobs run when one is dead with the same name, is there a way for a “service” job to exit gracefully like a batch job?

The only alternative I see is to have the garbage collector run very frequently, and I don’t like this option due to users potentially not seeing logs in time on a failing job.

2

Also, I notice running

nomad system gc -namespace="bob"

deletes all of the dead jobs, instead of just those in the specified namespace. Is that going to get worked out in the full release of 1.0?

3

Would your users be able to use nomad job stop -purge «jobname» instead of using the GC endpoint to accomplish a similar end?

I’m fairly certain that garbage collection is namespace agnostic, so I don’t believe the API honors the namespace that is submitted. I’ll give that a look, but I wanted to see if the -purge would work for your needs.

Hopefully this unblocks you.

Regards,
Charlie Voiselle
Product Education Engineer, Nomad

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