Introduction

nomad-lite is a distributed job scheduler with custom Raft consensus, similar to Nomad or Kubernetes scheduler. Jobs are shell commands executed in isolated Docker containers across a cluster.

Features

• Custom Raft Consensus - Leader election, log replication, and fault tolerance from scratch
• Distributed Scheduling - Jobs executed across cluster with automatic failover
• Unified CLI - Single binary for both server and client with automatic leader redirect
• mTLS Security - Mutual TLS for all gRPC communication
• Docker Sandboxing - Jobs run in isolated containers with restricted capabilities
• Web Dashboard - Real-time monitoring and job management
• gRPC + REST APIs - Type-safe client communication
• Job Cancellation - Cancel pending or running jobs via CLI, gRPC, or REST dashboard
• Health Endpoints - /health/live (process alive) and /health/ready (leader known) for orchestrator integration
• Graceful Shutdown - SIGTERM/SIGINT handling with drain period for in-flight work
• Leader Draining & Transfer - Voluntary leadership transfer and node draining for safe maintenance
• Batch Replication - Multiple job status updates batched into a single Raft log entry for reduced consensus overhead
• State Persistence - Optional RocksDB-backed Raft log, term, and snapshot storage via --data-dir; nodes survive restarts and rejoin without losing committed state
• Log Compaction - Automatic in-memory log prefix truncation with snapshot transfer to slow followers
• Proposal Backpressure - Bounded proposal queue (256 slots); clients get an immediate RESOURCE_EXHAUSTED when the leader is overloaded and a DEADLINE_EXCEEDED if a commit stalls, rather than hanging indefinitely

Requirements