5 ms·

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 w

by 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.
- mfer 5y ago
  If you want a bunch of the enterprise features you need to get nomad enterprise. Not everything is available in the FOSS version.
- maccard 5y ago
  Not OP but going to split my reply in two. > Why do you think Kubernetes has so much more traction than Nomad? I'm a dev on a small team, there is just no way I'm going to advocate for nomad when I can use a managed k8s cluster on any one of the cloud providers. Our CI tool supports k8s out of the box (but not nomad). Our logging stack is entirely turnkey - we have a sidecar container that _just works_. There is so much tooling out there that just works with k8s it would be insane to turn our back on it. > well-engineered stuff gets only a niche audience of people who appreciate such things. Well engineered is meaningless if it doesn't work or is a pain in the ass to use. A prime example is hashicorp vault. The documentation on setting that up to run is utterly terrifying for someone who is not a seasoned sysadmin. Of course I'm going to use the secret manager that comes with my cloud provider for free over the perfectly architeced 9 node vault cluster deployed with consulate for networking.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- heipei 5y ago
  As another sibling said: Because Google uses it. But also because many devs get very anxious when you tell them to use something that doesn't have the majority "mindshare" (yes, I have had people tell me that concern multiple times). Tell a frontend dev to use Ember over React and they will get sweaty palms and tell you that "React has won" or something like that. Tell someone they should use Nomad over k8s and they will tell you that they really should be working with whatever everyone else is working with, the the die have been cast and k8s has emerged as the winner. I believe it is a mixture of resume-driven development, which is a perfectly fair concern if you are planning to apply to the next job and have that item on your CV, and insecurity. Insecurity because someone might be worried that if they learn Nomad instead of k8s they will have trouble applying their knowledge later, as if the concepts aren't mostly 1:1 mappings. Same with most programming languages and frameworks du jour, but still some people think it's better to have 3 years of experience with Framework X instead of 1 year of experience each with Framework X, Y, and Z.
- dariusj18 5y ago
  Because Kubernetes matured far sooner and faster.

by heipei 5y ago

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.
mfer 5y ago
If you want a bunch of the enterprise features you need to get nomad enterprise. Not everything is available in the FOSS version.
maccard 5y ago
Not OP but going to split my reply in two. > Why do you think Kubernetes has so much more traction than Nomad? I'm a dev on a small team, there is just no way I'm going to advocate for nomad when I can use a managed k8s cluster on any one of the cloud providers. Our CI tool supports k8s out of the box (but not nomad). Our logging stack is entirely turnkey - we have a sidecar container that _just works_. There is so much tooling out there that just works with k8s it would be insane to turn our back on it. > well-engineered stuff gets only a niche audience of people who appreciate such things. Well engineered is meaningless if it doesn't work or is a pain in the ass to use. A prime example is hashicorp vault. The documentation on setting that up to run is utterly terrifying for someone who is not a seasoned sysadmin. Of course I'm going to use the secret manager that comes with my cloud provider for free over the perfectly architeced 9 node vault cluster deployed with consulate for networking.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
heipei 5y ago
As another sibling said: Because Google uses it. But also because many devs get very anxious when you tell them to use something that doesn't have the majority "mindshare" (yes, I have had people tell me that concern multiple times). Tell a frontend dev to use Ember over React and they will get sweaty palms and tell you that "React has won" or something like that. Tell someone they should use Nomad over k8s and they will tell you that they really should be working with whatever everyone else is working with, the the die have been cast and k8s has emerged as the winner. I believe it is a mixture of resume-driven development, which is a perfectly fair concern if you are planning to apply to the next job and have that item on your CV, and insecurity. Insecurity because someone might be worried that if they learn Nomad instead of k8s they will have trouble applying their knowledge later, as if the concepts aren't mostly 1:1 mappings. Same with most programming languages and frameworks du jour, but still some people think it's better to have 3 years of experience with Framework X instead of 1 year of experience each with Framework X, Y, and Z.
dariusj18 5y ago
Because Kubernetes matured far sooner and faster.