docs: Nomad 1.8 release notes

website/content/docs/enterprise/index.mdx

@@ -28,6 +28,28 @@ Nomad Enterprise Platform enables operators to easily upgrade Nomad as well as
 enhances performance and availability through Advanced Autopilot features such
 as Automated Upgrades, Enhanced Read Scalability, and Redundancy Zones.
 
+### Long Term Support (LTS) Releases
+
+Nomad Enterprise initiated the Long-Term Support (LTS) release program with
+Nomad 1.8. Going forward, the first major release of each calendar year will be
+an LTS release.
+
+LTS releases have the following benefits for Nomad operators:
+
+- **Extended maintenance:** Two years of critical fixes provided through minor
+releases 
+- **Efficient upgrades:** Support for direct upgrades from one LTS release
+to the next, reducing major-version upgrade risk and improving operational
+efficiency.
+
+LTS releases reduce operational overhead and risk by letting organizations
+receive critical fixes in minor releases without having to upgrade their major
+version more than once a year. Once you’ve upgraded to Nomad Enterprise 1.8,
+you will be running on a maintained LTS release that will allow you to easily
+upgrade to the next LTS major release when it's available. For more
+information, refer to HashiCorp’s multi-product LTS statement.
+
+
 ### Automated Upgrades
 
 Automated Upgrades allows operators to deploy a complete cluster of new
@@ -94,6 +116,17 @@ available for the specified Nomad task at hand.
 
 See the [Vault Integration documentation](/nomad/docs/integrations/vault-integration#enterprise-configuration) for more information.
 
+### Multiple Vault and Consul Clusters
+
+Nomad Enteprise allows sepcifying multiple integrations for Consul and Vault in
+the [vault](/nomad/docs/configuration/vault) and
+[consul](/nomad/docs/configuration/consul) portions of the Nomad agent
+configuration. After the agents are configured, Nomad jobspec writers can pick
+which Consul or Vault cluster to use in their job. Nomad administrators may
+also set default clusters for each in Nomad namespace configuration, as well as
+deny access to certain clusters by namespace.
+
+
 ## Governance & Policy
 
 Governance & Policy features are part of an add-on module that enables an

website/content/docs/release-notes/index.mdx

@@ -0,0 +1,12 @@
+---
+layout: docs
+page_title: Release Notes
+description: |-
+  Release notes for the major software packages for Nomad
+---
+
+# Release Notes
+
+Choose a version from the navigation sidebar to view the release notes for Nomad.
+
+Documentation for maintenance releases (e.g., 0.1.x) is on the bottom of each release notes page.

website/content/docs/release-notes/nomad/v1_8_x.mdx

@@ -0,0 +1,130 @@
+---
+layout: docs
+page_title: 1.8.x
+description: >-
+  Nomad release notes for version 1.8.x
+---
+
+# Nomad 1.8.0
+
+We are pleased to announce the following Nomad updates.
+
+## Release highlights
+
+- **Long Term Support Release (Enterprise):** Nomad 1.8 introduces a [long
+  term support release](/nomad/docs/enterprise#long-term-support-lts-releases) which provides extended maintenance (two years of
+  critical fixes provided through minor releases and efficient upgrades
+  (support for direct upgrades from one LTS release to the next).
+
+- **Exec2 Task Driver (beta):** The `exec2` driver is used to execute a
+  command for a task. It offers a security model optimized for running
+  'ordinary' processes with very low startup times and minimal overhead in
+  terms of CPU, disk, and memory utilization. The `exec2` driver leverages
+  kernel features such as the Landlock LSM, cgroups v2, and the unshare system
+  utility. Due these enhancements, tasks no longer require leveraging
+  filesystem isolation based on chroot, which provide an enhanced security
+  profile and improved performance for the Nomad operator. Refer to [Exec2 Task
+  Driver](/nomad/plugins/v1.8.x/drivers/exec2) for more details.
+
+- **Transparent proxy support for Consul service mesh:** Transparent Proxy
+  introduces a more seamless way of dialing upstream services when Consul service
+  mesh is enabled. Users can configure services to use transparent proxy with a
+  new [`transparent_proxy`](/nomad/docs/v1.8.x/job-specification/transparent_proxy)
+  block. When a service is configured to use transparent proxy, workloads can now dial the 
+  service using a virtual IP Consul DNS name.
+
+- **Consul API Gateway for Nomad:** Consul API Gateway on Nomad is now
+  officially supported. A prescriptive job specification on
+  [hashicorp-guides/consul-api-gateway-on-nomad](https://github.com/hashicorp-guides/consul-api-gateway-on-nomad)
+  along with a supporting [tutorial](/nomad/tutorials/integrate-consul/deploy-api-gateway-on-nomad) on
+  how to securely deploy Consul API gateway on Nomad.
+
+- **Re-worked Jobs page in the web UI with live updates:** Within the [Jobs index](/nomad/tutorials/web-ui/web-ui-workload-info#list-jobs) 
+  page Nomad has made a few improvements:
+
+  - **Prioirtize showing the current state over historical state for jobs:**
+  Previously, long-garbage-collected allocation placement failures, lost nodes,
+  and other historical representations of job state were shown alongside
+  currently running allocations. In self-healing jobs, this often meant that a
+  healthy job looked like it had failures, when in fact Nomad had replaced or
+  rescheduled those failures. Now, the jobs list tries to show accurate
+  allocation information and meaningful statuses (like "Degraded", or
+  "Recovering") to better illustrate the current state of a job. 
+  - **Server-side pagination:** For users with many thousands of jobs, the main
+  landing page for the web UI will no longer have a noticeable delay on
+  rendering. Users can control page length and filter paginated jobs
+  appropriately. 
+  - **Live updates:** Previously, users had to manually refresh
+  the page to see newly created jobs, or to hide jobs that had been stopped and
+  garbage-collected. Now, the jobs list will update in real-time as jobs are
+  created, updated, or removed. Further, any changes to allocations of jobs
+  on-page will be reflected in the status of that job in real-time.
+
+- **Time based task execution:** Using a CRON-like syntax, operators can now
+  schedule when tasks should execute and when they should stop. This provides
+  governance for tasks executed from jobs, and allows operators to easily opt-in 
+  or opt-out of a schedule that governs when the task can run through the web based UI.
+
+- **Sentinel policy management in the Web UI:** Enterprise users can manage
+  Sentinel policies directly within the Nomad UI. Users can create a Sentinel
+  policy based on a template provided from the UI or create policies directly
+  using an editor for Sentinel policies. Refer to [Sentinel policies](/nomad/tutorials/governance-and-policy/sentinel)
+  to learn more about how to use Sentinel within Nomad. 
+
+- **nomad-bench:** Nomad now provides a testing framework through [nomad-bench](https://github.com/hashicorp-forge/nomad-bench) 
+  which provisions infrastructure used to run tests and benchmarks against
+  Nomad test clusters. The infrastructure consists of Nomad test clusters that
+  each have a set of servers with hundreds or thousands of simulated nodes
+  created using nomad-nodesim. The Nomad server processes are not simulated and
+  are expected to run on their own hosts, mimicking real-world deployments.
+  Metrics are then gathered from the Nomad servers for use with benchmarking
+  and load testing.
+
+## What's deprecated
+
+- **LXC Task driver:** The [Community LXC Task
+  Driver](/nomad/plugins/drivers/community/lxc) is now deprecated. Official
+  support will be removed and the repo will be archived when Nomad 1.9 is
+  released. Users are encouraged to migrate their workloads to another task
+  driver such as the built-in Docker task driver[/nomad/docs/drivers/docker].
+
+- **ECS Task driver:** The remote [ECS Task
+  Driver](https://developer.hashicorp.com/nomad/plugins/drivers/remote/ecs) is
+  now deprecated. Official support will be removed and the repo will be
+  archived when Nomad 1.9 is released. Users are encouraged to migrate their
+  workloads to Amazon ECS or to another Nomad task driver.
+
+- **`stop_after_client_disconnect`, `max_client_disconnect`,
+  `prevent_reschedule_on_lost`:** Nomad 1.8.0 introduces a [disconnect](/nomad/docs/job-specification/disconnect)
+  block meant to group all the configuration options related to disconnected
+  client's and server's behavior, causing the deprecation of the fields
+  stop_after_client_disconnect, max_client_disconnect and
+  prevent_reschedule_on_lost. This block also introduces new options for
+  allocations reconciliation if the client regains connectivity.
+
+
+## What's removed
+
+- **raw_exec option `no_cgroups`:** In Nomad 1.7.0 the raw_exec plugin option
+  for no_cgroups became ineffective. Starting in Nomad 1.8.0 attempting to set
+  the no_cgroups in raw_exec plugin configuration will result in an error when
+  starting the agent.
+
+
+## Upgrading
+
+For more detailed information, please refer to the [upgrade details
+page](/nomad/docs/upgrade/upgrade-specific#nomad-1-8-0) and the changelogs.
+
+## Known issues
+
+The following issues are known to exist in the v1.8.x releases:
+
+## Changelogs
+
+The changelogs for this major release version and any maintenance versions are
+listed below.
+
+<Note> These links take you to the changelogs on the GitHub website. </Note>
+
+- [1.8.0](https://github.com/hashicorp/nomad/releases/tag/v1.8.0)

website/content/plugins/drivers/community/index.mdx

@@ -27,7 +27,6 @@ Below is a list of community-supported task drivers you can use with Nomad:
 - [LXC][lxc]
 - [Pledge][pledge]
 - [Pot][pot]
-- [Rkt][rkt]
 - [Rookout][rookout]
 - [Singularity][singularity]
 - [systemd-nspawn][nspawn-driver]
@@ -36,7 +35,6 @@ Below is a list of community-supported task drivers you can use with Nomad:
 
 [rookout]: /nomad/plugins/drivers/community/rookout
 [lxc]: /nomad/plugins/drivers/community/lxc
-[rkt]: /nomad/plugins/drivers/community/rkt
 [plugin_guide]: /nomad/docs/concepts/plugins
 [singularity]: /nomad/plugins/drivers/community/singularity
 [jail-task-driver]: /nomad/plugins/drivers/community/jail-task-driver

website/content/plugins/drivers/community/lxc.mdx

@@ -8,11 +8,14 @@ description: The LXC task driver is used to run application containers using LXC
 
 Name: `lxc`
 
+~> **Deprecation Warning!**
+The `lxc` driver is currently deprecated. We will not prioritize features or pull requests that affect the lxc driver. The external driver is available as an [open source
+repository](https://github.com/hashicorp/nomad-driver-lxc) for community ownership.
+
+
 The `lxc` driver provides an interface for using LXC for running application
 containers. You can download the external LXC driver [here][lxc-driver]. For more detailed instructions on how to set up and use this driver, please refer to the [LXC guide][lxc-guide].
 
-~> **Note:** The LXC client set up has changed in Nomad 0.9. You must use the new [plugin syntax][plugin] and install the external LXC driver in the [plugin_dir][plugin_dir] prior to upgrading. See [plugin options][plugin-options] below for an example. Note the job specification remains the same.
-
 ## Task Configuration
 
 ```hcl