Using Nomad without Consul?

Nomad
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Hi everyone,

I’m new to Nomad and Consul.

I have a simple app (small REST API + Postgres DB, in Docker containers) what I’d like to host on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure where I get 4 ARM cores with 24 GB RAM altogether for free, also I get 2 AMD VMs for free and I don’t need to pay a cent. I also get OCI Vault for free, so I probably don’t need to host HashiCorp Vault.

My main objective is to use this environment to host a tiny Nomad deployment, if possible. Obviously later if my app becomes profitable and it’s needed, I would pay for additional (or just bigger) VMs to make my infra better but in the beginning I don’t want to pay.

I read the hardware requirements of Nomad and Consul servers and they are big:

  • For Nomad servers: “4-8+ cores, 16-32 GB+ RAM, 40-80 GB+ of fast disk and significant network bandwidth”
  • For Consul servers: “designed to run reliably (but relatively slowly) on a server cluster of three AWS t2.micro instances”. So 1 core, 1 GB RAM.

About Nomad here I read "it’s going to scale with (1) the number of client nodes in your cluster, and (2) the number of jobs and allocations in that cluster. The hardware requirements we’ve provided are for typical enterprise use cases. If you’re running tiny clusters, you can probably get away with a lot less.”

I won’t have many client nodes, only two, and I won’t have many Nomad jobs (probably 3-4, one is the web app, the other is the DB, maybe some Redis later?). But even given this tiny workload, I guess even by running only Nomad servers, I will be probably on the edge of what’s possible with these servers, so resource-wise I probably can’t afford running Consul as well.

So in the end my architecture would be something like this:

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Without spending a lot of time learning Nomad, and experimenting, does this look feasible?

I guess I’m okay to join the nodes into the cluster manually as described here.

But I’m not sure what other features will I miss if I don’t use Consul?

What I expect from Nomad:

  1. Monitor the Web App and the DB processes. If they die, restart on the same node (web app on client-1 and DB on client-2)
  2. Show me some CPU and RAM usage charts
  3. Nice-to-have: if one node goes down, Nomad should try to run the job on the other node.

I’m aware this is not the world’s most resilient architecture but my goal is to make it work for free, while keeping the option to switch to more powerful VMs later and making it more stable for a bigger load. I think Kubernetes would be an overkill for this, the other thing I’m considering is k3s.

Please let me know if I’m on the right track or not.