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The biggest hurdle with adopting nomad is the kubernetes ecosystem and related network effects. Things like operators only run on Kubernetes, and they're drivi

The biggest hurdle with adopting nomad is the kubernetes ecosystem and related network effects. Things like operators only run on Kubernetes, and they're driving an entirely new paradigm of infrastructure and application management. HashiCorp is doing their best to keep up while supporting standard kube interfaces like CSI/CNI/CRI, but I don't know how they can possibly stay relevant with Kubernetes momentum. In my opinion, HashiCorp should look at what Rancher did with K3s and offer something like that, integrated with the entire Hashi stack. The only reason most people choose nomad is the (initial) simplicity of it (which quickly goes away once you realize how "on an island" you are with solutions for ingress etc). Deliver kube with that simplicity and Integration and it's a much more compelling story than what Nomad delivers today.

chucky_z 6y ago
This is what Nomad is though... It works without their other products and also natively integrates into them. Deploying Vault, Consul, and Nomad gives you a very nice experience. Also with Consul 1.8 and Nomad 0.11 you’ll get Consul Connect with Ingress gateways which solves some of those problems you mentioned.
- shaklee3 6y ago
  Nomad uses consul as the kv store, so it doesn't work without their other products.
  - chucky_z 6y ago
    Please make an attempt to understand a technology before making comments like this. Nomad has no requirement to store kv's, nor secrets. It's an entirely separate thing from Consul and Vault. It simply integrates with Consul, and Vault. It even runs its own raft store, so each product's backend is totally separate (Vault dropped it's reliance on other backends as of 1.4 and can run it's own raft store now). Nomad template stanzas are simply consul-template (https://github.com/hashicorp/consul-template#plugins https://github.com/hashicorp/consul-template#plugins), you could use `{{ with secret "" }}` and never touch Consul. You also have every function beyond service and the key* set of functions. You could build pretty static, or dynamic configurations using these blocks without ever touching Consul. On top of that, both Terraform templates and Levant work well for templating job specs out themselves, which contain template stanzas in them. An example of something helpful would be if you wanted to drop a very small binary that changes with each deploy, you could use https://github.com/hashicorp/consul-template#base64decode https://github.com/hashicorp/consul-template#base64decode and just change the contents each time you deploy the job. If you wanted to use redis keys in your consul-template, simply drop a binary on each server as a plugin to consul-template, then for example: `{{ "my-key" | plugin "redis" "get" }}`. Why not try running it yourself? `nomad agent -dev` will get you a server running, then `nomad job init` will give you a full spec which you can run with `nomad job run example.job`.
    - shaklee3 6y ago
      I understand nomad, and what you're saying is not how anyone runs it. Directly from their documentation: "Nomad schedules workloads of various types across a cluster of generic hosts. Because of this, placement is not known in advance and you will need to use service discovery to connect tasks to other services deployed across your cluster. Nomad integrates with Consul to provide service discovery and monitoring." So one of the very basic features of an orchestrator, which is service discovery, requires consul. Sure, I can use it without consul to just start jobs that don't communicate, but obviously that's that the normal use case of it, and you can see that by looking at their issues list.

chucky_z 6y ago

This is what Nomad is though... It works without their other products and also natively integrates into them. Deploying Vault, Consul, and Nomad gives you a very nice experience. Also with Consul 1.8 and Nomad 0.11 you’ll get Consul Connect with Ingress gateways which solves some of those problems you mentioned.

shaklee3 6y ago
Nomad uses consul as the kv store, so it doesn't work without their other products.
- chucky_z 6y ago
  Please make an attempt to understand a technology before making comments like this. Nomad has no requirement to store kv's, nor secrets. It's an entirely separate thing from Consul and Vault. It simply integrates with Consul, and Vault. It even runs its own raft store, so each product's backend is totally separate (Vault dropped it's reliance on other backends as of 1.4 and can run it's own raft store now). Nomad template stanzas are simply consul-template (https://github.com/hashicorp/consul-template#plugins https://github.com/hashicorp/consul-template#plugins), you could use `{{ with secret "" }}` and never touch Consul. You also have every function beyond service and the key* set of functions. You could build pretty static, or dynamic configurations using these blocks without ever touching Consul. On top of that, both Terraform templates and Levant work well for templating job specs out themselves, which contain template stanzas in them. An example of something helpful would be if you wanted to drop a very small binary that changes with each deploy, you could use https://github.com/hashicorp/consul-template#base64decode https://github.com/hashicorp/consul-template#base64decode and just change the contents each time you deploy the job. If you wanted to use redis keys in your consul-template, simply drop a binary on each server as a plugin to consul-template, then for example: `{{ "my-key" | plugin "redis" "get" }}`. Why not try running it yourself? `nomad agent -dev` will get you a server running, then `nomad job init` will give you a full spec which you can run with `nomad job run example.job`.
  - shaklee3 6y ago
    I understand nomad, and what you're saying is not how anyone runs it. Directly from their documentation: "Nomad schedules workloads of various types across a cluster of generic hosts. Because of this, placement is not known in advance and you will need to use service discovery to connect tasks to other services deployed across your cluster. Nomad integrates with Consul to provide service discovery and monitoring." So one of the very basic features of an orchestrator, which is service discovery, requires consul. Sure, I can use it without consul to just start jobs that don't communicate, but obviously that's that the normal use case of it, and you can see that by looking at their issues list.