armada

One API. Any number of clusters. Millions of jobs.

The open-source batch job meta-scheduler that makes Kubernetes work at scale.

Website · Quickstart · Documentation · Slack

What is Armada?

Kubernetes was built for services. Armada was built for batch.

When your job volume exceeds what a single cluster can handle, you need a control plane that sits above your fleet — routing jobs intelligently, fairly, and at scale. Armada is that layer.

Armada solves the problems Kubernetes wasn't designed to handle:

• No job queue — Kubernetes has no concept of ordering. Jobs compete for resources with no fairness guarantees. Armada adds a proper queue with priority, fair-share, and rate limiting.
• No multi-cluster coordination — Each Kubernetes cluster is an island. Armada routes jobs across as many clusters as you need from a single API.
• Fine grained gang-scheduling — Distributed jobs that need all workers to start together (MPI, PyTorch, Spark) are either fully scheduled or held in queue. Armada's implementation is battle-tested at scale with deep fairness and preemption integration.
• No fairness across teams — One team can starve everyone else. Armada enforces fair-share scheduling so heavy users don't permanently dominate shared infrastructure.

Armada is used in production at G-Research since 2020, processing millions of batch jobs per day across tens of thousands of nodes.

Features

Getting started

The fastest way to get Armada running locally is with the Armada Operator:

git clone https://github.com/armadaproject/armada-operator.git
cd armada-operator
make kind-all

→ Full quickstart guide — get up and running in an instant!

armadactl

armadactl is installed automatically when you run make kind-all. To install it standalone or on a machine without the full Armada setup:

# download via script
scripts/get-armadactl.sh

# or grab the binary from the release page
https://github.com/armadaproject/armada/releases/latest

Local development

Armada runs locally via Goreman — dependencies (Redis, Postgres, Pulsar) run in containers, Armada components run as host processes built from source. Iteration is fast and debuggers attach directly.

mage kind                  # one-time: create local Kubernetes cluster
export KUBECONFIG=.kube/external/config

mage dev:up                # default — no auth
mage dev:up auth           # with OIDC via Keycloak
mage dev:up fake-executor  # no Kubernetes cluster needed
mage dev:down              # stop dependency containers

→ Full local development guide — profiles, procfiles, service ports, authentication, and debugging.

Use cases

Armada is used wherever batch jobs are too large, too many, or too complex for a single Kubernetes cluster:

• Quantitative finance & HPC — millions of short-lived simulations per day with fair-share across research teams
• ML and AI training — distributed GPU training with gang scheduling across clusters
• Platform engineering — multi-tenant batch infrastructure with a single API surface
• SLURM migration — familiar scheduling semantics (queues, priorities, preemption) on Kubernetes-native infrastructure
• CI/CD at scale — priority control so critical merges always run first

In production

Armada has been running in production at G-Research since 2020.

Running Armada in production? Open a PR to add yourself to ADOPTERS.md 🙌

Community

Everyone is welcome — come and say hi! 👋

• 💬 Slack — #armada on CNCF Slack — fastest way to get help and talk to maintainers
• 💡 GitHub Discussions — longer-form questions and ideas
• 🐛 GitHub Issues — bug reports and feature requests
• 📅 Community meetings — bi-weekly, open to all. Join #armada on Slack for the invite link
• ⭐ Star the repo — helps more people find Armada

Contributing

We'd love your contributions — code, docs, bug reports, or ideas. All are welcome.

• Read CONTRIBUTING.md for guidelines
• Check good first issues for a starting point
• All commits require a DCO sign-off: git commit -s
• Please review CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md before contributing

Documentation

Talks and videos

• Armada — high-throughput batch scheduling
• Building Armada — Running Batch Jobs at Massive Scale on Kubernetes

_{Armada is a Cloud Native Computing Foundation Sandbox project 🚀
Apache 2.0 License}