Nomad is neat, but I think it's the wrong paradigm. Say you wanted to write an application that inspects the current state of jobs running in Nomad and modify

Nomad is neat, but I think it's the wrong paradigm. Say you wanted to write an application that inspects the current state of jobs running in Nomad and modify them. You need to design something specifically to do that within nomad. Essentially you need to integrate their proprietary interface into your application. In a distributed operating system you would just do ls /proc/host/*/* and then issue syscalls or write to files in /proc/ and /sys/. No proprietary interface, it's just operating system primitives. I think it's so simple that it's hard for people to grasp how insanely easier this would be than any current system. Look up Mosix/OpenMosix (but that's an SSI; I'm not saying we should do SSI exactly, it's just an example of the simplicity).