Nomad Advanced Job Placement

Nomad gives operators fine-grained control over where allocations land. In this lab you deploy a web application and the Traefik load balancer as Nomad jobs on a 4-node cluster (1 server, 3 clients) backed by Consul service discovery, then use Nomad's placement stanzas to steer them:

• Use a constraint to pin Traefik to a specific Nomad client so you can reach its dashboard.
• Use spread to distribute the web app's allocations evenly across all 3 clients for failure tolerance.
• Use an affinity to express a soft preference to run the web app on a larger client, and observe how

Nomad weighs your preference against its own anti-affinity and bin-packing logic.

Along the way you use Nomad's variable interpolation so each web app instance binds to the dynamic port Nomad selects, letting multiple instances share a client, while Traefik load balances across them using the services they register in Consul.

We recommend completing the Nomad Basics and Nomad Simple Cluster labs first.