Size Nomad on Google Cloud

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

Monthly cost

$491.86

Annual cost

$5,902/year

Line-item breakdown

Compute	$415.36
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

This Extra Small Nomad cluster supports up to 50 small jobs on a starter production cluster. The primary cost driver is compute, specifically the 3x n2-standard-2 and 3x n2-standard-4 instances. This configuration prioritizes a low monthly cost of $0.12 by disabling high availability, which means the cluster is not resilient to zone or instance failures.

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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 May 6, 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.