5 ms·

Disclaimer: I work at HashiCorp, but have been of this opinion since before joining (source: https://atodorov.me/2021/02/27/why-you-should-take-a-look-at-nomad-

by sofixa 3y ago

Disclaimer: I work at HashiCorp, but have been of this opinion since before joining (source: https://atodorov.me/2021/02/27/why-you-should-take-a-look-at-nomad-before-jumping-on-kubernetes/ https://atodorov.me/2021/02/27/why-you-should-take-a-look-at...) HashiCorp Nomad is a perfectly easy and flexible orchestrator (not only containers, also VMs, random binaries, Firecracker, WASM, etc.) that is production grade. It has a number of advantages over Kubernetes (being drastically easier to deploy, use and maintain; having integrated native templating with logic; being much nimbler but also being able to scale much more, etc. etc.) and it's a very good choice in many scenarios. Of course there's also disadvantages, most notably ecosystem size, but often that doesn't matter. Kubernetes is great and extremely powerful, but also very complex and straight up overkill for many organisations.

wg0 3y ago
I've run both. First k8s is free and nothing beats free but that's not about it. Nomad's mental model is hard to grasp. Or let's say is not as elegant. It's is nowhere near k8s. And k8s at least from a usage standpoint can be explained in under ten minutes. Pod, Deployment, Service, Ingress and you're pretty much done.
stuff4ben 3y ago
yeah, but ya'lls licensing tho...
- orangepurple 3y ago
  https://www.hashicorp.com/products/nomad/pricing https://www.hashicorp.com/products/nomad/pricing There is an unsupported community edition
  - dharmab 3y ago
    In case you haven't heard, the next version of Nomad is moving to a non Open Source license.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
  - networkchad 3y ago
    [dead]
mati365 3y ago
Nomad solution moves complexity from tech to license ;)
nh2 3y ago
We're using Nomad, and appreciate its comparative simplicity (we launch plain binaries created with Nix), but there are still basic features missing that can create struggles. The ones I hit are: * It can't work down batch jobs in priority order [1] -- a feature even the ultra-old university cluster schedulers had * Sometimes job starts can be in arbitrary order, in the API and the UI, making it difficult to find the most recent ones [2] * Nomad seems to store pretty much everything in its Raft state, making it extremely slow to startup and operate (including GUI) if some rogue process created 100k allocations. Cleaning that up seems to require nuking the Raft state, thus also losing all info about all jobs. I don't know how well Kubernetes does in these areas. [1]: https://github.com/hashicorp/nomad/issues/12792 https://github.com/hashicorp/nomad/issues/12792 [2]: https://github.com/hashicorp/nomad/issues/17742 https://github.com/hashicorp/nomad/issues/17742
- k8svet 3y ago
  Someone I know once worked for the company maintaining etcd at the time and... they were appalled at how it was underpinning millions of dollars of VC dreams on it, implicitly via kubernetes, with the flaws and downsides, and operational complexities it has. And now to hear you say this of Nomad and Raft. I guess, my take away at this second is to really be skeptical of hype that I don't have years of operational knowledge and experience with. Which, to be fair, regarding my current tech du jour (well, 9+ years), I have a list of complaints that could span a short novela.

by sofixa 3y ago

wg0 3y ago

I've run both. First k8s is free and nothing beats free but that's not about it. Nomad's mental model is hard to grasp. Or let's say is not as elegant. It's is nowhere near k8s. And k8s at least from a usage standpoint can be explained in under ten minutes. Pod, Deployment, Service, Ingress and you're pretty much done.

stuff4ben 3y ago

yeah, but ya'lls licensing tho...

orangepurple 3y ago
https://www.hashicorp.com/products/nomad/pricing https://www.hashicorp.com/products/nomad/pricing There is an unsupported community edition
- dharmab 3y ago
  In case you haven't heard, the next version of Nomad is moving to a non Open Source license.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
- networkchad 3y ago
  [dead]

mati365 3y ago

Nomad solution moves complexity from tech to license ;)

nh2 3y ago

We're using Nomad, and appreciate its comparative simplicity (we launch plain binaries created with Nix), but there are still basic features missing that can create struggles. The ones I hit are: * It can't work down batch jobs in priority order [1] -- a feature even the ultra-old university cluster schedulers had * Sometimes job starts can be in arbitrary order, in the API and the UI, making it difficult to find the most recent ones [2] * Nomad seems to store pretty much everything in its Raft state, making it extremely slow to startup and operate (including GUI) if some rogue process created 100k allocations. Cleaning that up seems to require nuking the Raft state, thus also losing all info about all jobs. I don't know how well Kubernetes does in these areas. [1]: https://github.com/hashicorp/nomad/issues/12792 https://github.com/hashicorp/nomad/issues/12792 [2]: https://github.com/hashicorp/nomad/issues/17742 https://github.com/hashicorp/nomad/issues/17742

k8svet 3y ago
Someone I know once worked for the company maintaining etcd at the time and... they were appalled at how it was underpinning millions of dollars of VC dreams on it, implicitly via kubernetes, with the flaws and downsides, and operational complexities it has. And now to hear you say this of Nomad and Raft. I guess, my take away at this second is to really be skeptical of hype that I don't have years of operational knowledge and experience with. Which, to be fair, regarding my current tech du jour (well, 9+ years), I have a list of complaints that could span a short novela.