Size Nomad on Google Cloud

Extra Small — up to 50 small jobs on a starter production cluster

Monthly cost

$956.88

Annual cost

$11,483/year

Line-item breakdown

Compute	$880.38
Storage	$76.50
Other	$0.00

Components provisioned

Role	Instance	vCPU	GB RAM	Storage
Server	3 × n2-standard-2	2	8	50 GB
Client	3 × n2-standard-4	4	16	100 GB

Why this sizing

Nomad at the extra small tier maps to the starter-cluster reference architecture on Google Cloud in us-central1. Compute is the largest line item in this estimate, accounting for 92% of monthly cost. High availability is not included here, so this baseline stays lean and leaves failover headroom out of the monthly total. Client carries the heaviest storage footprint at 100 GB on each of its 3 nodes.

Export

Share the current URL or copy the launch Terraform baseline.

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Google Cloud Terraform baseline

terraform {
  required_version = ">= 1.6.0"

  required_providers {
    google = {
      source  = "hashicorp/google"
      version = "~> 6.0"
    }
  }
}

variable "project_id" {
  description = "Google Cloud project ID for this deployment."
  type        = string
  default     = "replace-with-project-id"
}

provider "google" {
  project = var.project_id
  region  = "us-central1"
  zone    = "us-central1-a"
}

# Generated for Google Cloud from the current estimate state.

resource "google_compute_disk" "server_1_data" {
  count = 3
  name  = "nomad-server-1-data-${count.index + 1}"
  type  = "pd-ssd"
  zone  = "us-central1-a"
  size  = 50
}

resource "google_compute_instance" "server_1" {
  count        = 3
  name         = "nomad-server-1-${count.index + 1}"
  machine_type = "n2-standard-2"
  zone         = "us-central1-a"

  boot_disk {
    initialize_params {
      image = "projects/debian-cloud/global/images/family/debian-12"
      size  = 50
      type  = "pd-balanced"
    }
  }

  network_interface {
    network = "default"
    access_config {}
  }
  attached_disk {
    source = google_compute_disk.server_1_data[count.index].id
    mode   = "READ_WRITE"
  }

  labels = {
    app  = "nomad"
    role = "server"
  }
}


resource "google_compute_disk" "client_2_data" {
  count = 3
  name  = "nomad-client-2-data-${count.index + 1}"
  type  = "pd-ssd"
  zone  = "us-central1-a"
  size  = 100
}

resource "google_compute_instance" "client_2" {
  count        = 3
  name         = "nomad-client-2-${count.index + 1}"
  machine_type = "n2-standard-4"
  zone         = "us-central1-a"

  boot_disk {
    initialize_params {
      image = "projects/debian-cloud/global/images/family/debian-12"
      size  = 50
      type  = "pd-balanced"
    }
  }

  network_interface {
    network = "default"
    access_config {}
  }
  attached_disk {
    source = google_compute_disk.client_2_data[count.index].id
    mode   = "READ_WRITE"
  }

  labels = {
    app  = "nomad"
    role = "client"
  }
}

Sources

Reference architecture: Nomad for starter-cluster, version Nomad current production reference guidance, retrieved April 13, 2026.

https://developer.hashicorp.com/nomad/docs/install/production

Pricing: Google Cloud pricing snapshot, retrieved April 12, 2026.

Commercial pricing only. GovCloud, sovereign cloud, and discounts beyond those shown are not modelled.

Not included in this estimate

Vendor licensing and support
Professional services
Network egress
Compliance controls
Backup storage
Monitoring

Based on Nomad production guidance and translated into a VM-based control-plane plus starter-worker baseline.

Estimate excludes Consul, Vault, external load balancers, persistent storage for stateful jobs, and the real resource needs of the applications scheduled by Nomad.