4 ms·

I feel like we've already seen some alternatives and the industry, thus far, is still orienting towards k8s. Hashicorp's stack, using Nomad as an orchestrator,

by jaaron 5y ago

I feel like we've already seen some alternatives and the industry, thus far, is still orienting towards k8s. Hashicorp's stack, using Nomad as an orchestrator, is much simpler and more composable. I've long been a fan of Mesos' architecture, which I also think is more composable than the k8s stack. I just find it surprising an article that is calling for an evolution of the cluster management architecture fails to investigate the existing alternatives and why they haven't caught on.

verdverm 5y ago
We had someone explore K8s vs Nomad and they said K8s because nomad docs are bad. They got much further with K8s in the same timeboxed spike
- bradstewart 5y ago
  Setting up the right parameters/eval criteria to exercise inside of a few week timebox (I'm assuming this wasn't a many month task) is extremely difficult to do for a complex system like this. At least, to me it is--maybe more ops focused folks can do it quicker. Getting _something_ up and running quickly isn't necessarily a good indicator of how well a set of tools will work for you over time, in production work loads.
  - verdverm 5y ago
    It was more about migrating the existing microservices than some example app, runs in docker compare today. Getting the respective platforms up was not the issue. I don't think weeks were spent, but they were able to migrate a complex application to K8s in less than a week. Couldn't get it running in Nomad, which was tried first due to its supposed simplicity over K8s.
- mlnj 5y ago
  For me when exploring K8s vs Nomad, Nomad looked like a clear choice. That was until I had to get Nomad + Consul running. I found it all really difficult to get running in a satisfactory manner. I never even touched the whole Vault part of the setup because it was all overwhelming. On the other side K8s was a steep learning curve with lots of options and 'terms' to learn but never was a point into the whole exploration where I was stuck. The docs are great. the community is great and the number of examples available allows us to mix n match lots of different approaches.
- hnlmorg 5y ago
  Several years ago -- so pre-K8s too -- I was tasked with setting up a Nomad cluster and failed miserably. Nomad and Consul are designed to be worked together but also designed distinctly enough that it was a bloody nightmare trying to figure out what order of priority things needed to be spun up and how they all interacted with each other. The documentation was more like a man page where you'd get a list of options but very little guidance on how to set it up, unlike K8s who's documentation has a lot of walk-through material. Things might have improved massively for Nomad since but I honestly have no desire to learn. Having used other Hashicorp tools since, I see them make the same mistakes time and time again. Now I'm not the biggest fan of K8s either. I completely agree that they're hugely overblown for most purposes despite being sold as a silver bullet for any deployment. But if there's one thing K8s does really well it's describing the different layers in a deployment and then wrapping that up in a unified block. There's less of the "this thing is working but is this other thing" when spinning up a K8s cluster.

by jaaron 5y ago

verdverm 5y ago

We had someone explore K8s vs Nomad and they said K8s because nomad docs are bad. They got much further with K8s in the same timeboxed spike

bradstewart 5y ago
Setting up the right parameters/eval criteria to exercise inside of a few week timebox (I'm assuming this wasn't a many month task) is extremely difficult to do for a complex system like this. At least, to me it is--maybe more ops focused folks can do it quicker. Getting _something_ up and running quickly isn't necessarily a good indicator of how well a set of tools will work for you over time, in production work loads.
- verdverm 5y ago
  It was more about migrating the existing microservices than some example app, runs in docker compare today. Getting the respective platforms up was not the issue. I don't think weeks were spent, but they were able to migrate a complex application to K8s in less than a week. Couldn't get it running in Nomad, which was tried first due to its supposed simplicity over K8s.
mlnj 5y ago
For me when exploring K8s vs Nomad, Nomad looked like a clear choice. That was until I had to get Nomad + Consul running. I found it all really difficult to get running in a satisfactory manner. I never even touched the whole Vault part of the setup because it was all overwhelming. On the other side K8s was a steep learning curve with lots of options and 'terms' to learn but never was a point into the whole exploration where I was stuck. The docs are great. the community is great and the number of examples available allows us to mix n match lots of different approaches.
hnlmorg 5y ago
Several years ago -- so pre-K8s too -- I was tasked with setting up a Nomad cluster and failed miserably. Nomad and Consul are designed to be worked together but also designed distinctly enough that it was a bloody nightmare trying to figure out what order of priority things needed to be spun up and how they all interacted with each other. The documentation was more like a man page where you'd get a list of options but very little guidance on how to set it up, unlike K8s who's documentation has a lot of walk-through material. Things might have improved massively for Nomad since but I honestly have no desire to learn. Having used other Hashicorp tools since, I see them make the same mistakes time and time again. Now I'm not the biggest fan of K8s either. I completely agree that they're hugely overblown for most purposes despite being sold as a silver bullet for any deployment. But if there's one thing K8s does really well it's describing the different layers in a deployment and then wrapping that up in a unified block. There's less of the "this thing is working but is this other thing" when spinning up a K8s cluster.