Many teams jump straight into Kubernetes because it feels like the industry standard, but the truth is that not everyone needs that level of complexity—especially when starting out. HashiCorp Nomad offers a simpler, flexible, and far more approachable way to orchestrate workloads, yet so many practitioners don’t realize that Nomad may actually be the tool they need first.

This session introduces Nomad from a beginner’s perspective. It explains what Nomad is, why it exists, and how it helps teams run applications without fighting operational overhead. Nomad handles container workloads, batch jobs, binaries, stateful services, and legacy applications in one unified system. This makes it a powerful tool for small teams, growing startups, engineers learning orchestration for the first time, or organizations who want reliability without maintaining a full Kubernetes ecosystem.

The talk walks through the core ideas behind Nomad, including how its scheduler works, how services are distributed across nodes, and how it integrates naturally with Consul and Vault. It highlights how Nomad simplifies common deployment challenges, reduces infrastructure friction, and gives teams predictable and secure operations with minimal setup.

Attendees will leave with a clear understanding of why Nomad is a great starting point for engineers exploring orchestration, how it can grow with their infrastructure, and why Nomad might already be solving problems they didn’t know they had. The goal is to make Nomad feel accessible, practical, and even exciting for anyone encountering it for the first time.