Nomad on Lykins Blog

Recording CLI Demos with a Cursor Skill and VHS

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Agents are already running CLI workflows for you. So why not a shareable, editable recording you can drop into a blog post, README, or pull request. I wired that up as a Cursor Agent Skill that drives Charmbracelet VHS: the agent turns a session into a .tape file and renders a GIF. Below is how it works, using the Nomad CLI as the concrete walkthrough.

Also, Tom Straub was the one who inspired this skill, but don’t tell him.

Codified Observability — Layer 4: Orchestration

Fri, 05 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This is part 5 of a series based on my DevOpsCon San Diego 2026 talk. Part 4 co-deployed dashboards with Terraform. This post is Layer 4 — Orchestration: keeping agents dynamic on day 2 instead of treating them like frozen packages on disk.

The Alloy job lives in 2-LGTM/jobs/lgtm/alloy.nomad.hcl. It is the payoff for Layer 1 installing Alloy but leaving systemd disabled.

Note: Like the rest of this series, this post was drafted by an agent from content I generated for the talk, as a test of what an agent can plan and produce. See part 1 for context.

Codified Observability — Layer 2: Platforms

Wed, 03 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This is part 3 of a series based on my DevOpsCon San Diego 2026 talk. Part 2 baked Alloy into the base image. This post is Layer 2 — Platforms: the observability stack itself, managed as code.

The code lives in 2-LGTM/ of the devopscon-2026 lab.

Note: Like the rest of this series, this post was drafted by an agent from content I generated for the talk, as a test of what an agent can plan and produce. See part 1 for context.

First Look Nomad 1.11.x - System Job Deployments

Fri, 02 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This last Nomad 1.11.x feature I will be covering is not new to Nomad itself, but enhances how system jobs can be updated in your clusters.

What’s New?

In Nomad 1.11.x, system jobs now support deployment functionality which will allow operators to manage changes and rollbacks for system jobs more effectively. This enhancement gives additional control over how system jobs are deployed and maintained across your infrastructure.

As always, I would heavily recommend reading the release notes, which I have linked above, and the documentation on the update block as it has been updated to call out different behaviors when used with system jobs, such as the following:

First Look Nomad 1.11.x - Secret Block

Thu, 18 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The next Nomad 1.11.x feature we will be looking at is Artifact Secrets which introduces a new secret block in the job specification to simplify the process of fetching secrets for your Nomad jobs in addition to one key difference compared to the existing template block.

Out of the box there are two built-in plugins which support Nomad variables and Vault. In addition to the built-in plugins there is a secret provider plugin framework which allows community or privately built plugins to support their secrets management systems. For example, check out the demo they provided for AWS Secrets Manager.

First Look Nomad 1.11.x - Client Node Introduction and Identity

Mon, 17 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Nomad 1.11.x was recently released and I wanted to highlight some of the new features in a series of posts.

Client node introduction and identity
Artifact secrets
System job deployments

For this first post, I want to focus on the client node introduction and identity. This will require reading through the release note documentation, updated pages, CLI and API references, as a lot has been added around this feature and I will not cover in detail.

Containerizing a GitHub Actions Runner for Nomad

Sat, 09 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

So containerizing a custom runner image actually came out a bit simpler than I had expected, this is mostly since others did the heavy lifting for me :).

Credit

All credit goes to the following posts:

How to containerize a GitHub Actions self-hosted runner

Deploying Self-Hosted GitHub Actions Runners with Docker

Changes

So I did make a few changes when I was building my runners.

Built with Packer

This gave me an opportunity to play with the Packer Docker Plugin.

Intermission: HashiConf

Mon, 21 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Just getting back from HashiConf. After 5ish years of watching it virtually, I was finally able to attend in person. This is also the first time I have also publicly presented, definitely will do it again if I am given the opportunity.

This is me.

Yes, I was wearing a fanny pack. I used it to carry my two of my props on stage. Raspberry Pi and one of my Minicomputers to show what I ran Nomad on.

Setting up the Nomad Cluster

Sun, 13 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

My first task in setting up my Nomad Image Factory is creating the Nomad cluster.

Lab:

3 : Mini Computers
- N100 CPU
- 16 GB Memory
- 2 : 1GB Nics
Proxmox

Nomad Cluster:

Simple Cluster
- 3 Nodes with Server and Client Role
- 2 CPU
- 4 GB Memory
- Ubuntu 24

Installing Nomad:

I take the easy way to install Nomad.

sudo apt-get update && \
 sudo apt-get install wget gpg coreutils

wget -O- https://apt.releases.hashicorp.com/gpg | \
 sudo gpg --dearmor -o /usr/share/keyrings/hashicorp-archive-keyring.gpg

echo "deb [signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/hashicorp-archive-keyring.gpg] https://apt.releases.hashicorp.com $(lsb_release -cs) main" \
| sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/hashicorp.list

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install nomad

After installing you should be able to check the Nomad version to confirm.

Intro - Nomad Image Factory

Tue, 08 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Howdy.

Just a quick introduction in preparation for my series to expand on my HashiConf talk.

Unfortunately, I had to cut out portions of building a full end to end Nomad Image Factory from my talk, but I am going to use my blog to fill in what was missed.

My series of posts are going to be as follows:

Setting up Nomad - Development Server and Cluster

Preparing for my talk, I did not get the chance to play with Consul, so I am going to give it a shot, as well.

Terraform Professional + HashiConf Talk

Wed, 28 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Just a short little update today. I am going to be documenting a new series of blog posts.

HashiCorp Certified: Terraform Authoring and Operations Professional

Took the test as part of the beta program a while back and finally got a result :)

It was a fun opportunity and would recommend others to give it a shot!

HashiConf Presentation

So back when a call for presenters went out for HashiConf, I put out a short topic on learning Nomad. It is one of the Hashi products which has intrigued me the most. I just have not had a reason or opportunity to work with it. Especially with 2 kids aged 3 and under, the amount of free time I have to learn something new is limited.