8 ms·

HashiCorp Nomad 1.1 Beta

106 points by edouardb 5y ago

blakesterz 5y ago
More announcements should start like this one does: "We are excited to announce that the beta release of HashiCorp Nomad 1.1 is now available. Nomad is a simple and flexible orchestrator used to deploy and manage containers and non-containerized applications across on-premises and cloud environments. " I know I've heard of Nomad but couldn't remember what it does. This explained it perfect! I often see an announcement show up here on HN or on Twitter or my RSS Feed and there's not any mention of what the thing is/does other than what's new.
- hijinks 5y ago
  I always say Nomad is what Mesos should be if you re-wrote it and fixed the mistakes that caused it to "lose" out to Kubernetes.
- dlandis 5y ago
  I guess I still don't understand the "why", in terms of why someone would use or be interested in the product. What differentiates it? It would be so helpful if companies talked in terms of some very specific use-cases that their product excels at, and then move to more general capabilities.
  - heipei 5y ago
    The "why" is in the second sentence: "Nomad is a simple and flexible orchestrator used to deploy and manage containers and non-containerized applications across on-premises and cloud environments." If you need a workload orchestrator for heterogeneous workloads (i.e. not just Docker) and need something that is simple then Nomad is for you.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
cyberpunk 5y ago
Congrats on the beta and everything, but honestly who isn’t using k8s at this point in time? Even running your own on prem is simple as with things like rancher these days.
- kawsper 5y ago
  We're running Nomad, it's doing one thing and one thing well, when we looked at Kubernetes and all the moving parts it comes with plus all the opioniated stacks people tend to run with it, it was a daunting learning experience, we managed to get it running but the upgrade processes felt brittle and it seemed like a full-time job just keeping it updated and happy. Nomad + Consul have been one of the best decisions we've made, it's simple to reason about, easy to maintain, the upgrade path haven't been stressful and it requires a minimum of maintenance.
  - MrSaints 5y ago
    I'm quite curious about your scale / size of your team. Most of the moving parts for k8s are easily handled if you go for a managed service. Using Nomad alone is fine, but with Consul in the mix, it requires quite a bit of set-up (especially for some degree of HA), and from my experience, is no less harder than using something like k3s. Overall from my perspective, it just seems like Nomad + Consul sits in two places. Either for an org. small enough where HA is not a concern, so setting it up, and running it "on-premise" is trivial. Or, for an org. large enough where you can have a team dedicated to setting it up, and managing it to ensure it meets various SLAs. Genuinely curious to know what's your experience been like, and if it matches up with this.
    - kawsper 5y ago
      We're 1.5 people to do ops works, but no one is full time on it, I'm the main responsible and I have someone that helps me when he's interested. We are 5 developers. Our whole platform is between 10-50 EC2 machines running a Nomad cluster, Nomad manages our Docker containers and with services backed by RDS. I think managed services were in their infancy when we did our initial research back in 2017/2018, Tectonic+Kubernetes with CoreOS looked promising but they were bought by Red Hat and probably rebranded/merged/disappeared into OpenShift. EKS was in beta an only available in the US (we're in EU). We did try Rancher but we hit issues with it. I don't know if K3S existed yet, but just looking at the diagram on their website it does look quite interesting. We launched Consul first and started defining all of our services, and after that we started moving applications into Nomad. HA has been quite easy with Terraform on EC2. We build "golden-images" with Packer, and then launch them with Terraform, upgrading Consul is adding 3 new servers, making sure things are stable, and then removing the 3 old servers.
katsura 5y ago
Nomad seems great, and I wanted to jump in a lot of times, but I found it hard to do. I'm not sure why though. Setting up a basic project is easy if you follow their tutorials, but at a certain point it just gets confusing, and you end up piecing things together, because you'll need Consul and Vault. So after a while I just got lost. Maybe because I don't live and breathe all the orchestration related jargon. In my limited experience, and my use-case, I found that dealing with docker-compose and docker stack is much more straightforward, and seems to work out of box.
- heipei 5y ago
  I agree with you that if you're looking at single-node deployments, Nomad or any distributed orchestrator will feel like overkill. I personally use Nomad quite a lot, but for single-box systems I'll happily revert to using plain Docker containers started via systemd service files. The beauty of something like Nomad is that you can run it on a single box with moderately more effort than docker compose, but then you can flick a switch and have your workloads run across multiple machines.
  - maccard 5y ago
    > The beauty of something like Nomad is that you can run it on a single box with moderately more effort than docker compose, but then you can flick a switch and have your workloads run across multiple machines. How is that any different to kubernetes with k3s?
    - sofixa 5y ago
      k3s is still drastically more complex, with a lot more moving parts.
      - maccard 5y ago
        Honest question; how? And what difference does that make to running an app? Running on k8s involves writing 2 yaml files, and scaling is literally the flick of a switch. The architecture of nomad may be simpler but how does that benefit me as a user? I've been running apps in kubernetes for about 2 years now at a "mild" scale and not once has the complexity of k8s been the show stopping issue it's made out to be here on HN.
heipei 5y ago
I've said it in basically every thread on Nomad on HN, and I'll say it again: Nomad is an awesome piece of focused technology and an absolute pleasure to work with. There is one very clear way to do things, everything feels very polished, and you don't need a combination of tools or even third-party services to get set up. I'd encourage anyone to try Nomad, download the single binary to your laptop, fire up the orchestrator in single-node dev-mode and submit a few lines of a service definition file and see how it feels. Regardless of whether you already know k8s or use it, just give it a try, it will give you a better appreciation for what Nomad does and doesn't do, and what decisions it made to get there. The same advice is true for any competing set of technologies really.
- api 5y ago
  Why do you think Kubernetes has so much more traction than Nomad? It seems like a general pattern in tech: the more complicated, cumbersome, clunky stuff gets traction while the smooth and well-engineered stuff gets only a niche audience of people who appreciate such things.
  - mrweasel 5y ago
    Honestly: Because Google uses it. Everyone wants to be Google and have Google size problems. Using Nomad is an admission that you're not really a big player, and your problems can be solved by an easily understood off-the-shelf solution (with a support program). Part of it might also be the fact that may developer don't know their options, and just pick the one solution they sort of know. I currently work on a project where we briefly had another consulting company involved. Their staff heard: container, devops and traefic and immediately reached for Kubernetes. The project has four different containers and no HA requirements. Our solution: Maybe kill off Traefic and use the HAProxy installation that we need to a different part of the project anyway and just deploy the four containers using docker-compose or Ansible.
    - jen20 5y ago
      > Using Nomad is an admission that you're not really a big player Yet ironically, Nomad can deal with (much) larger clusters, schedule jobs faster, and generally require less screwing about than Kubernetes does.
dim13 5y ago
If I've learned something in recent years, is: stay way from HashiCopr stuff as far as you can. It is all nice and shiny on paper, but applied to "real world" conditions … it sucks. It works, as long you never touch it again. But, if you dare to look at it with wrong eye, it will break, and if it breaks, it breaks beyond all repair. Every time.
- zbentley 5y ago
  I'd love to know why you think that. Is there a story there?

106 points by edouardb 5y ago

More announcements should start like this one does: "We are excited to announce that the beta release of HashiCorp Nomad 1.1 is now available. Nomad is a simple and flexible orchestrator used to deploy and manage containers and non-containerized applications across on-premises and cloud environments. " I know I've heard of Nomad but couldn't remember what it does. This explained it perfect! I often see an announcement show up here on HN or on Twitter or my RSS Feed and there's not any mention of what the thing is/does other than what's new.

hijinks 5y ago
I always say Nomad is what Mesos should be if you re-wrote it and fixed the mistakes that caused it to "lose" out to Kubernetes.
dlandis 5y ago
I guess I still don't understand the "why", in terms of why someone would use or be interested in the product. What differentiates it? It would be so helpful if companies talked in terms of some very specific use-cases that their product excels at, and then move to more general capabilities.
- heipei 5y ago
  The "why" is in the second sentence: "Nomad is a simple and flexible orchestrator used to deploy and manage containers and non-containerized applications across on-premises and cloud environments." If you need a workload orchestrator for heterogeneous workloads (i.e. not just Docker) and need something that is simple then Nomad is for you.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

cyberpunk 5y ago

Congrats on the beta and everything, but honestly who isn’t using k8s at this point in time? Even running your own on prem is simple as with things like rancher these days.

kawsper 5y ago
We're running Nomad, it's doing one thing and one thing well, when we looked at Kubernetes and all the moving parts it comes with plus all the opioniated stacks people tend to run with it, it was a daunting learning experience, we managed to get it running but the upgrade processes felt brittle and it seemed like a full-time job just keeping it updated and happy. Nomad + Consul have been one of the best decisions we've made, it's simple to reason about, easy to maintain, the upgrade path haven't been stressful and it requires a minimum of maintenance.
- MrSaints 5y ago
  I'm quite curious about your scale / size of your team. Most of the moving parts for k8s are easily handled if you go for a managed service. Using Nomad alone is fine, but with Consul in the mix, it requires quite a bit of set-up (especially for some degree of HA), and from my experience, is no less harder than using something like k3s. Overall from my perspective, it just seems like Nomad + Consul sits in two places. Either for an org. small enough where HA is not a concern, so setting it up, and running it "on-premise" is trivial. Or, for an org. large enough where you can have a team dedicated to setting it up, and managing it to ensure it meets various SLAs. Genuinely curious to know what's your experience been like, and if it matches up with this.
  - kawsper 5y ago
    We're 1.5 people to do ops works, but no one is full time on it, I'm the main responsible and I have someone that helps me when he's interested. We are 5 developers. Our whole platform is between 10-50 EC2 machines running a Nomad cluster, Nomad manages our Docker containers and with services backed by RDS. I think managed services were in their infancy when we did our initial research back in 2017/2018, Tectonic+Kubernetes with CoreOS looked promising but they were bought by Red Hat and probably rebranded/merged/disappeared into OpenShift. EKS was in beta an only available in the US (we're in EU). We did try Rancher but we hit issues with it. I don't know if K3S existed yet, but just looking at the diagram on their website it does look quite interesting. We launched Consul first and started defining all of our services, and after that we started moving applications into Nomad. HA has been quite easy with Terraform on EC2. We build "golden-images" with Packer, and then launch them with Terraform, upgrading Consul is adding 3 new servers, making sure things are stable, and then removing the 3 old servers.

katsura 5y ago

Nomad seems great, and I wanted to jump in a lot of times, but I found it hard to do. I'm not sure why though. Setting up a basic project is easy if you follow their tutorials, but at a certain point it just gets confusing, and you end up piecing things together, because you'll need Consul and Vault. So after a while I just got lost. Maybe because I don't live and breathe all the orchestration related jargon. In my limited experience, and my use-case, I found that dealing with docker-compose and docker stack is much more straightforward, and seems to work out of box.

heipei 5y ago
I agree with you that if you're looking at single-node deployments, Nomad or any distributed orchestrator will feel like overkill. I personally use Nomad quite a lot, but for single-box systems I'll happily revert to using plain Docker containers started via systemd service files. The beauty of something like Nomad is that you can run it on a single box with moderately more effort than docker compose, but then you can flick a switch and have your workloads run across multiple machines.
- maccard 5y ago
  > The beauty of something like Nomad is that you can run it on a single box with moderately more effort than docker compose, but then you can flick a switch and have your workloads run across multiple machines. How is that any different to kubernetes with k3s?
  - sofixa 5y ago
    k3s is still drastically more complex, with a lot more moving parts.
    - maccard 5y ago
      Honest question; how? And what difference does that make to running an app? Running on k8s involves writing 2 yaml files, and scaling is literally the flick of a switch. The architecture of nomad may be simpler but how does that benefit me as a user? I've been running apps in kubernetes for about 2 years now at a "mild" scale and not once has the complexity of k8s been the show stopping issue it's made out to be here on HN.

heipei 5y ago

I've said it in basically every thread on Nomad on HN, and I'll say it again: Nomad is an awesome piece of focused technology and an absolute pleasure to work with. There is one very clear way to do things, everything feels very polished, and you don't need a combination of tools or even third-party services to get set up. I'd encourage anyone to try Nomad, download the single binary to your laptop, fire up the orchestrator in single-node dev-mode and submit a few lines of a service definition file and see how it feels. Regardless of whether you already know k8s or use it, just give it a try, it will give you a better appreciation for what Nomad does and doesn't do, and what decisions it made to get there. The same advice is true for any competing set of technologies really.

api 5y ago
Why do you think Kubernetes has so much more traction than Nomad? It seems like a general pattern in tech: the more complicated, cumbersome, clunky stuff gets traction while the smooth and well-engineered stuff gets only a niche audience of people who appreciate such things.
- mrweasel 5y ago
  Honestly: Because Google uses it. Everyone wants to be Google and have Google size problems. Using Nomad is an admission that you're not really a big player, and your problems can be solved by an easily understood off-the-shelf solution (with a support program). Part of it might also be the fact that may developer don't know their options, and just pick the one solution they sort of know. I currently work on a project where we briefly had another consulting company involved. Their staff heard: container, devops and traefic and immediately reached for Kubernetes. The project has four different containers and no HA requirements. Our solution: Maybe kill off Traefic and use the HAProxy installation that we need to a different part of the project anyway and just deploy the four containers using docker-compose or Ansible.
  - jen20 5y ago
    > Using Nomad is an admission that you're not really a big player Yet ironically, Nomad can deal with (much) larger clusters, schedule jobs faster, and generally require less screwing about than Kubernetes does.

dim13 5y ago

If I've learned something in recent years, is: stay way from HashiCopr stuff as far as you can. It is all nice and shiny on paper, but applied to "real world" conditions … it sucks. It works, as long you never touch it again. But, if you dare to look at it with wrong eye, it will break, and if it breaks, it breaks beyond all repair. Every time.

zbentley 5y ago
I'd love to know why you think that. Is there a story there?