Running Nomad for a Home Server
mrkaran.dev
Running Nomad for a Home Server
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Re: Running Nomad for a Home Server
#2Nomad is good at running all sort of workloads, not just container workloads. Also there is a plugin[0] to run containers without docker so Nomad is headed in the right direction for scenarios where you only need a scheduler.
Re: Running Nomad for a Home Server
#3The biggest problem with these posts is that authors seem to fail to see how K8s isn't targeting home servers or small companies. Sure, there's K3s which allows you to have a more minimalistic experience but it's still K8s.
K8s is enterprise stuff and should be seen as such. It's complex because the problems that are being attempted to solve are complex and varied. That doesn't discount that Nomad is a great piece of software though.
Re: Running Nomad for a Home Server
#4Nomad looks useful to me for use cases that have nothing to do with "a simple k8s" but more with distributed/HA systemd and cron.
Just deployed a small 3 node cluster in prod last week for this: run some binaries with some parameters, make sure they restart on failure, have them move to another node if one fails or is rebooted, and don't waste resources by having a classical active/passive 2 node setup that doesn't scale either.
It took me a couple of days to read the documentation which is good but not always up to date (I did have to dig in some github issues in one case), create a test setup and check failure scenarios. Gotta say I'm mostly impressed.
Re: Running Nomad for a Home Server
#5The biggest problem with these posts is that authors seem to fail to see how K8s isn't targeting home servers or small companies. Sure, there's K3s which allows you to have a more minimalistic experience but it's still K8s. K8s is enterprise stuff and should be seen as such. It's complex because the problems that are being attempted to solve are complex and varied. That doesn't discount that Nomad is a great piece of…
Nomad's support for CNI and CSI is improving with just about every release, and they just proved you can run over 2 million containers in a globally distributed cluster.
https://www.hashicorp.com/blog/hashicorp-nomad-meets-the-2-m...
So what's an example of "enterprise" and "complex" problems you think it can't do?
Re: Running Nomad for a Home Server
#6Coincidentally my home server is also named Hydra, running Nomad on CoreOS/Flatcar. I've had this setup for years now running without issue (unless I managed to mess it up myself by, for example, changing the IP and not following proper procedures to restore the Raft cluster).
Recently I deployed K3s on the same node to add some new workloads, but now that I want to move those workloads to Nomad to get rid of the cpu and memory usage of K8s. I'm running into what is becoming my main problem with Nomad that I never thought I had.
With all it's complexities, getting something to run on K8s is as simple as adding a Helm chart name to a Terraform config file and running apply. Maybe I need to set a value or volume, but that's it. Everything below is pretty much standardised.
With Nomad however, it's benefit of doing only one thing very well also means that all the other things like ingress and networking need to be figured out yourself. And since there is no standard regarding these everyone invents their own, preventing something like k8s-at-home [0] to emerge. Also K8s is pretty agnostic in container backend where Nomad needs configurations for every driver.
I think writing your own Helm charts for everything would suck more than writing the Nomad configs. Though a lot could be automatically generated for both of them. But I'm missing a community repository of sorts for Nomad.
Re: Running Nomad for a Home Server
#7The biggest problem with these posts is that authors seem to fail to see how K8s isn't targeting home servers or small companies. Sure, there's K3s which allows you to have a more minimalistic experience but it's still K8s. K8s is enterprise stuff and should be seen as such. It's complex because the problems that are being attempted to solve are complex and varied. That doesn't discount that Nomad is a great piece of…
Nomad's support for CNI and CSI is improving with just about every release, and they just proved you can run over 2 million containers in a globally distributed cluster. https://www.hashicorp.com/blog/hashicorp-nomad-meets-the-2-m... So what's an example of "enterprise" and "complex" problems you think it can't do?
K8s targets a long list of things that Nomad just doesn't want to deal with in the name of simplicity - and that's ok, if that suits your use case.
Some are mentioned in the post but I can think of secret management, load balancing, config management, routing, orchestration beyond workloads (e.g. storage), rollbacks/rollouts and many more. Perhaps in few areas there are some support but it's not what Nomad intends to do anyway. I also like these points from another comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26142658
In order to supply those needs in Nomad you'll need to spend time finding out how to integrate different solutions, keep them up-to-date, etc. At that point, K8s may be a better answer. If you don't need any of those, use Nomad or anything else that's simpler (e.g. ECS if you're in AWS, K3s if that's simple enough for your home server, etc).
Re: Running Nomad for a Home Server
#8The biggest problem with these posts is that authors seem to fail to see how K8s isn't targeting home servers or small companies. Sure, there's K3s which allows you to have a more minimalistic experience but it's still K8s. K8s is enterprise stuff and should be seen as such. It's complex because the problems that are being attempted to solve are complex and varied. That doesn't discount that Nomad is a great piece of…
> The biggest problem with these posts is that authors seem to fail to see how K8s isn't targeting home servers or small companies.
Who would you say are in the target audience of Kubernetes?
I doubt most medium to large companies I see implementing Kubernetes could be considered a good fit for Kubernetes. If you want to run on-prem / colo you are probably better of with something simpler like Nomad. If you want Kubernetes it's probably a better idea to use a hosted Kubernetes solution like Google's offering. For most teams it's probably too much complexity to be able to maintain, troubleshoot, secure, update, etc.
Re: Running Nomad for a Home Server
#9Hashicorp has very cool stuff but I am not a fan of the config language they use on all their projects. It’s fine when I’m in an infrastructure type role and recency recall is fine but when Hashicorps tools are in my periphery it is a pain. Anyone share this? I guess the alternative is templated tomls/yamls/pseudo-jsons. Wish we’d all agree to one templated configuration format.
Re: Running Nomad for a Home Server
#10The biggest problem with these posts is that authors seem to fail to see how K8s isn't targeting home servers or small companies. Sure, there's K3s which allows you to have a more minimalistic experience but it's still K8s. K8s is enterprise stuff and should be seen as such. It's complex because the problems that are being attempted to solve are complex and varied. That doesn't discount that Nomad is a great piece of…
> The biggest problem with these posts is that authors seem to fail to see how K8s isn't targeting home servers or small companies. Who would you say are in the target audience of Kubernetes? I doubt most medium to large companies I see implementing Kubernetes could be considered a good fit for Kubernetes. If you want to run on-prem / colo you are probably better of with something simpler like Nomad. If you want Kube…
> K8s is enterprise stuff
The comment you’re replying to already said whom.