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Nomad vs. Kubernetes

nomadproject.io

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Re: Nomad vs. Kubernetes

#21

Post by WJW »

mrweasel wrote: post #15

There seems to be plenty of reasons to run Nomad, compared to Kubernetes, but in what scenarios do Nomad lose out to Kubernetes? Is it simply a matter of Kubernetes being an open source project and Nomad being owned by HashiCorp?

I don't think being OSS has much to do with it; it's more that the dominance of k8s leads to more people learning it, which leads to more tooling being written, which makes k8s better, which leads to more companies adopting it and more people learning it. It's a virtuous cycle much like programming languages experience.

Re: Nomad vs. Kubernetes

#22

Post by proxysna »

capableweb wrote: post #4
DeathArrow wrote: post #3

Nomad seems much simpler to use and manage if you need to do simpler things, but Kubernetes allows you to do more. We use Kubernetes instead of Nomad at work but we are also using Consul in the Kubernetes cluster.

> Nomad seems much simpler to use and manage Agree, Nomad is so easy to get started and because of the simplicity of the architecture, very easy to maintain as well. > but Kubernetes allows you to do more ... We use Kubernetes instead of Nomad at work Same here, Kubernetes at work, Nomad for personal projects. But I have yet to find anything I cannot do in Nomad that you normally do in Kubernetes. Could you provide s…

> But I have yet to find anything I cannot do in Nomad that you normally do in Kubernetes.

VM live migration. I was surprised that people use kubevirt for that, but apparently this is a valid usecase. Otherwise nomad can do relatively complex vm configurations.

Re: Nomad vs. Kubernetes

#23

Post by johnnycerberus »

tazjin wrote: post #16
johnnycerberus wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There you Go (pun intended). Go even replaced a low-level language like C++ and achieved the same result in the end. I don't know why I thought it's Java, probably the first Kube was initially in Java. It's even better that they managed to pull that off.

But it did not replace it. Google runs on Borg. Go lets you build things fast, but the lack of strong typing and the vast amount of language pitfalls make maintenance hard in the long run. The community also has the attitude to pretend that these pitfalls don't actually exist, which is very different from C++ where most peculiar behaviours are well-understood and controlled.

Sorry, I don't think I have been explicit in my comment. The language of K8s, a system which is the so-called direct descendant of Borg, replaced C++ at that layer. Also, Go is strongly typed.

Re: Nomad vs. Kubernetes

#24

Post by hnlmorg »

tazjin wrote: post #16
johnnycerberus wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There you Go (pun intended). Go even replaced a low-level language like C++ and achieved the same result in the end. I don't know why I thought it's Java, probably the first Kube was initially in Java. It's even better that they managed to pull that off.

But it did not replace it. Google runs on Borg. Go lets you build things fast, but the lack of strong typing and the vast amount of language pitfalls make maintenance hard in the long run. The community also has the attitude to pretend that these pitfalls don't actually exist, which is very different from C++ where most peculiar behaviours are well-understood and controlled.

I've had just as many problems maintaining mature C++ projects as I have maintaining mature Go projects.

Ultimately it all boils down to two things:

- The projects being well written and well maintained from the outset

- Personal preference

I cannot overstate that second point.

It really is about time developers stopped pushing their own personal preferences as if it's some kind of fact.

Re: Nomad vs. Kubernetes

#25

Post by Fiahil »

> Kubernetes is an orchestration system for containers

Yes, but No. Kubernetes is a portability platform, that happen to -also- orchestrate containers.

Using kubernetes means you have complete reproducibility of the network setup, the deployment and the operation of any workload -no matter how complex-, on any kubernenetes cluster and cloud provider.

Nomad, is -well- just a glorified Airflow.

Re: Nomad vs. Kubernetes

#26

Post by alvarlagerlof »

nuerow wrote: post #19
mrweasel wrote: post #15

There seems to be plenty of reasons to run Nomad, compared to Kubernetes, but in what scenarios do Nomad lose out to Kubernetes? Is it simply a matter of Kubernetes being an open source project and Nomad being owned by HashiCorp?

> There seems to be plenty of reasons to run Nomad, compared to Kubernetes, but in what scenarios do Nomad lose out to Kubernetes? It would also be interesting if Docker's Swarm was.also featured in this comparison, as it just works right out of the box and doesn't come with any bells and whistles.

Does it support multiple nodes?

Re: Nomad vs. Kubernetes

#27

Post by q3k »

mrweasel wrote: post #15

There seems to be plenty of reasons to run Nomad, compared to Kubernetes, but in what scenarios do Nomad lose out to Kubernetes? Is it simply a matter of Kubernetes being an open source project and Nomad being owned by HashiCorp?

Kubernetes is much more than container scheduling. Custom resources, identity and a powerful RBAC system allow you to use it as a general configuration/operational data store in your own code, from implementing operators acting upon kubernetes and the outside world to even moving most of high-level configuration glue to be natively based on Kubernetes.

For example, with cert-manager running on Kubernetes you can request a TLS certificate by creating a Certificate resource (like you would any other Kubernetes resource). This is the same regardless of whether you want a self-signed certificate, an ACME-issued certificate (and whether that gets performed via HTTP01 or DNS01 or something else). Oh, and this fully ties into Kubernetes' RBAC system.

In Nomad the closest thing is annotating jobs with traefik-specific tags (and allowing Traefik to do cluster-wide discovery of all tags), but that only works for serving certificates that are managed by traefik, not if your application wants eg. to terminate the TLS connection itself, or if it wants some other PKI hierarchy (eg. a self-signed CA which then issues some other certificates for mutual TLS auth between application services).

Kubernetes also has better support for organization-wide multi-tenant clusters than Nomad seems to have (eg. nomad's policy engine, audit logging and resource quota system are gated behind their “enterprise” offering).

Re: Nomad vs. Kubernetes

#28

Post by johnnycerberus »

farresito wrote: post #18
johnnycerberus wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There you Go (pun intended). Go even replaced a low-level language like C++ and achieved the same result in the end. I don't know why I thought it's Java, probably the first Kube was initially in Java. It's even better that they managed to pull that off.

> Go even replaced a low-level language like C++ and achieved the same result in the end Did it, though? Honest question. I get the feeling that it ended up competing with Java (and Python) more than it ended up replacing C++. The C++ folks seem to be way more into Rust than Go.

I'm a Java fan and an ex-Scala aficionado. I would have hoped that JVM would eat the pie when it comes to cloud deployments but it didn't happen. Like Scala.js never happened and TypeScript became the type system of the web. JVM languages will remain at the application layer, concerned with microservices, data processing, streaming, databases, etc. It's not what folks seem to be way more into, it's all about tradeoffs. I am talking here about layers and the suitability of a language at a specific layer. I don't know about Rust, but Go proved that it can handle it. If Rust would prove to be better, that would be great, but only time will tell. Until now it did not happen, instead people are trying to fit Rust in scenarios where a higher-level language would go round in circles (GUI programming, microservices, game development etc.). For Java it is too late, if GraalVM with native images and value types would have been released earlier, maybe we could say that Java could compete with Go at that layer, but it is not, the train has left the station long time ago. Only if Oracle comes out of the cave and throw a lot of money at a JVM alternative to Kubernetes, which is likely to happen in the foreseeable future, given the investments and the attention the Java platform has received recently.

Re: Nomad vs. Kubernetes

#29

Post by capableweb »

Fiahil wrote: post #25

> Kubernetes is an orchestration system for containers Yes, but No. Kubernetes is a portability platform, that happen to -also- orchestrate containers. Using kubernetes means you have complete reproducibility of the network setup, the deployment and the operation of any workload -no matter how complex-, on any kubernenetes cluster and cloud provider. Nomad, is -well- just a glorified Airflow.

Nomad, just like Unix, prefers composition of simple tools in favor of one-big-tool-for-everything that Kubernetes is going for. So for achieving those things, you'd use Terraform or something similar, and then you have a reproducible environment for the hardware/software setup outside of Nomad.

> Yes, but No. Kubernetes is a portability platform, that happen to -also- orchestrate containers.

The homepage of Kubernetes seems to disagree with you. Their headline there is "Kubernetes, also known as K8s, is an open-source system for automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications." and also "Production-Grade Container Orchestration" so it feels safe to assume that Kubernetes is for orchestrating containers.

> Nomad, is -well- just a glorified Airflow.

I never used Airflow, but looking at the website it seems to be geared towards automating workflows, something like Zapier but self-hosted and open source? That's very different from what Nomad is.

Re: Nomad vs. Kubernetes

#30

Post by nuerow »

alvarlagerlof wrote: post #26
nuerow wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There seems to be plenty of reasons to run Nomad, compared to Kubernetes, but in what scenarios do Nomad lose out to Kubernetes? It would also be interesting if Docker's Swarm was.also featured in this comparison, as it just works right out of the box and doesn't come with any bells and whistles.

Does it support multiple nodes?

> Does it support multiple nodes?

Yes it does. Docker Swarm essentially provides an easy way to get a cluster of Docker instances running in multiple nodes that works right out of the box.

https://docs.docker.com/engine/swarm/

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