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Running Nomad for a Home Server

mrkaran.dev

41–50 of 153 posts

Re: Running Nomad for a Home Server

#41

I did/do run both myself, Kubernetes and Nomad, and it was a million times easier to set up Nomad (including Consul) on bare metal than it was to set up Kubernetes. Kubernetes offers more features, but you most likely don't need them and the increase in complexity makes it a pain to maintain. I'm running a three-node cluster on Hetzner [0] for Pirsch [1] right now and haven't had any difficulties whatsoever when upgr…

bear metal sounds so sick.

I'm in for an industrywide rename :D.

Re: Running Nomad for a Home Server

#42

I did/do run both myself, Kubernetes and Nomad, and it was a million times easier to set up Nomad (including Consul) on bare metal than it was to set up Kubernetes. Kubernetes offers more features, but you most likely don't need them and the increase in complexity makes it a pain to maintain. I'm running a three-node cluster on Hetzner [0] for Pirsch [1] right now and haven't had any difficulties whatsoever when upgr…

bear metal sounds so sick. I'm in for an industrywide rename :D.

Woops :D

Re: Running Nomad for a Home Server

#43
Why would you run Nomad for a home server? This isn't for home server use. This is for practicing skills only required in commercial environments. Skills you only have a need for because someone pays you: because it's not fun and stupid.

Taking that process home and doing all that instead of just running nginx from your distro repos on the sbc OS is cargo cult insanity for 99% of cases.

Re: Running Nomad for a Home Server

#44

Why would you run Nomad for a home server? This isn't for home server use. This is for practicing skills only required in commercial environments. Skills you only have a need for because someone pays you: because it's not fun and stupid. Taking that process home and doing all that instead of just running nginx from your distro repos on the sbc OS is cargo cult insanity for 99% of cases.

It’s software? It’s all of triggering an ordered copy-paste process (downloading and installing is just a less random copy-paste).

I dunno about you but I don’t download Ubuntu’s package repo. I have to run an install command and then customize nginx. What’s the real logistical difference to the user if they run this command or that command? Or set config values in this file or that?

Why are you using Linux at home? Unix is for servers!

Nginx “replaced” Apache. Did we expect nothing would replace it?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_fixedness

Re: Running Nomad for a Home Server

#45

Maybe it's because Nomad is a commercial product as well, but it's really sad that it doesn't get more usage. Kubernetes is the new hotness, to the point where people don't care that the don't really need Kubernetes. They just know that the big boys are using it, so regardless of scale, so should they. Kubernetes is exceedingly complex, and it needs to be, to support all it's use cases. However, I would claim that th…

I’ve often thought that when developers saw Kubernetes, what they actually wanted was some form of PaaS

Re: Running Nomad for a Home Server

#46
post #38

We're using Nomad to power several clusters at Monitoro[0]. We're a super small team and I have to say our experience operating Nomad in production has been extremely pleasant - we're big fans of Hashicorp's engineering and the quality of their official docs. Our biggest gripe is the lack of managed Nomad offerings such as GKE (on google cloud). However once things are set up and running it requires minimal to no mai…

The selling point of GKE etc. is “minimal to no maintenance,” but of course somebody else is doing the maintenance and the customer is paying a premium for it. Says great things about Nomad.

Yeah, when making the decision it was quite harrowing to think of maintaining a cluster in production. Nomad had very little operational complexity compared to what we imagined.

We've had two main outages in months:

- Server disks were filling up and we hadn't set up monitoring properly at the time (ironic for the name of our company :) ). Not Nomad's fault.

- A faulty healthcheck caused all the servers of a cluster to restart at the same time, which caused complete loss of the cluster state (so all the jobs were gone. I like to call it a collective amnesia of the servers).

We're still looking for a good/reliable logging and tracing solution though. Nomad has a great dashboard, but only with basic logging, and it only gets you so far.

Overall, would recommend again!

Re: Running Nomad for a Home Server

#47
post #34
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I myself would love to see more usage of HCL... after writing a lot of Terraform configurations, it feels so much nicer for me than any JSON or YAML/Helm configuration I have written to this day. We should agree on some kind of HCL-based industry standard and leave all these workarounds via JSON/YAML behind us... e.g. doing Helm logic with these Go templates just looks like a step backwards after writing Terraform HC…

The thing I dislike about YAML is how unwieldy it gets and how quickly that happens. "Simple" YAML files tend to be half a dozen pages long. HCL is more information-dense.

how is HCL better than YAML ?

people can misuse HCL too, YAML misuse is not uncommon.

Re: Running Nomad for a Home Server

#48

I did/do run both myself, Kubernetes and Nomad, and it was a million times easier to set up Nomad (including Consul) on bare metal than it was to set up Kubernetes. Kubernetes offers more features, but you most likely don't need them and the increase in complexity makes it a pain to maintain. I'm running a three-node cluster on Hetzner [0] for Pirsch [1] right now and haven't had any difficulties whatsoever when upgr…

bear metal sounds so sick. I'm in for an industrywide rename :D.

There's probably a startup name in there somewhere.

Bear Metal Semiconductor. Bear Metal Fabrication. Bear Metal Labs. You could get so creative with the branding and logo.

Re: Running Nomad for a Home Server

#49

From the article: > I always maintain "Day 0 is easy, Day N is the real test of your skills". Would be interesting to see how this applies to the author's use of Nomad. It's easy to shit on Kubernetes because of its complexity, but this article seems to be comparing the Nomad Day 0 experience with the Kubenrnetes Day N experience. I'm firmly of the opinion that you don't need much more than systemd (or equivalent) +…

The Nomad Day N experience is pretty good. I help maintain 4 Nomad clusters running approx 40k Allocations (like Pods) for work. We have basically no problems with Nomad itself, and requires pretty much no day to day intervention. Upgrades are pretty painless too. We've gone from 0.7.x to 0.12.x with these same clusters, and will be going to 1.x soon.

Happy to try to answer specific questions.

Re: Running Nomad for a Home Server

#50
post #44

Why would you run Nomad for a home server? This isn't for home server use. This is for practicing skills only required in commercial environments. Skills you only have a need for because someone pays you: because it's not fun and stupid. Taking that process home and doing all that instead of just running nginx from your distro repos on the sbc OS is cargo cult insanity for 99% of cases.

It’s software? It’s all of triggering an ordered copy-paste process (downloading and installing is just a less random copy-paste). I dunno about you but I don’t download Ubuntu’s package repo. I have to run an install command and then customize nginx. What’s the real logistical difference to the user if they run this command or that command? Or set config values in this file or that? Why are you using Linux at home?…

As the article says,

>Nomad is also a simpler piece to keep in your tech stack. Sometimes it's best to keep things simple when you don't really achieve any benefits from the complexity.

Simple is better. But in this case he doesn't realize that he's stuck way up the complexity stack in a local minimum that's way more complex than most of the potential software landscape. None of that is needed to expose a webserver. Just run nginx on the machine from repos with no containers, no deployment, etc, etc complexity and forward the port.

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