I'm maintaining a nomad cluster already a few years now at home, based on some thin clients and a few raspberry pi's.

The workload is growing from uses cases of the plane-spotting services towards a pi-hole setup, vaultwarden, homeassistant and many more use cases.

One of the issues I encountered was based on the default scheduling algorithm. Raspberry pi's are not known as the most efficient solution to run a huge workload. Default nomad will schedule new containers on one compute node until the resource limits of that node are consumed and only then will start consuming another node. This …

I do use puppet as our main configuration management tool. Together with puppetdb all our services are automatically configured from bottom to top.

And it rocks, getting automated as much as possible it is like easy as hell to get a server up and running. The only feature it lacked in my opinion is orchestration. I do know about collective which is made for this purpose.

Only it's yet again using an agent which fails from time to time and eating resources which can be avoided. It's the same reason I don't use the puppet agent daemon but trigger puppet …