Version 0.10 of workload orchestrator Nomad is finally generally available. 
HashiCorp co-founder Mitchell Hashimoto used the keynote at HashiConf EU last July to inform users about the major changes, giving them time to prepare. 

Some of the key challenges tackled in this release belong to the area of service networking. One new feature addressing those is network namespace support, which allows the configuration of isolated networks for different task groups. This is largely meant to facilitate the secure deployment of applications.

The feature however also serves as the basis for the native Consul Connect integration, which is also part of the release. Consul Connect “provides service mesh capabilities”. The integration into Nomad lets users set up secure communication between the services managed through Nomad without having to change code. To realise that, Nomad was fitted with the new job specification stanzas connect and sidecar_service, an introduction to which can be found in an older blog post.

Another new addition is host volumes, allowing volume-sharing between parties using files already on the host. According to Hashimoto, future releases will see the enabling of all network storage plugins which would make additional volumes an option.

The Nomad team also looked into usability for the v0.10 release and added a visual file system explorer to the tool’s UI. With it, users are promised a way to directly look into the files of any allocation, so that they for example can read text files or keep track of log file changes without leaving their browser.

More information on the agent and client improvements as well as the fixed bugs in the current version can be found the Nomad release notes.

A quick glance into the milestone list of the project doesn’t give any idea on when the next bigger release will land. The Nomad team however plans to add a security model similar to those in Consul and Vault to the documentation on the way to v0.11, which would be a good thing to have.