Case Study: Jet.com achieves Windows microservice containment with HashiCorp Nomad and Damon

Running Windows Microservices on Nomad at Jet.com

Jet.com worked with HashiCorp while migrating its microservice platform to Nomad and needed a practical way to run Windows/.NET Framework microservices in 2016, when Windows containers were still immature and the only Nomad option for .NET was raw_exec. The challenge was to add containment and resource controls on Windows without the overhead, VM complexity, and version-matching limitations of Windows containers.

HashiCorp’s ecosystem was used alongside an open-source tool Jet.com built called Damon to wrap Windows executables and apply Job Object-based resource constraints under Nomad. This let Jet.com run and schedule Windows microservices without Docker for Windows, while also exposing process statistics for monitoring; the case study describes the approach as a workable way to constrain processes, though it does not provide specific quantitative performance or cost metrics.

Jet.com

Justen Walker

Senior Software Engineer