Nomad vs. Kubernetes

I love Nomad and so do our devs, but K8s has a much larger ecosystem and more tooling options.

A few examples:

- If you want to run some third party software, there's a helm chart for that. In Nomad, you're likely going to figure things for yourself.

- K8s has a lot of cool stuff like Knative, KEDA and others for more sophisticated deployments.

- K8s has tons of operators to integrate with public clouds and external services. Nomad really lacks something similar.

- There's a ton of knowledge and guides related to K8s online, not so much for Nomad.

- There are many managed K8s solutions, which makes things easier. To this date Hashicorp still does not have managed Nomad.

There's a saying in Dutch: "Wij van Wc-eend adviseren Wc-eend"[1]. It basically boils down to pretending to give advice or information but you're just promoting your own interests.

[1]: https://untranslatable.co/p/amarens/wij-van-wc-eend

Software: bunch of solaris/omnios vm's, torrent client, owncloud, mtproto proxies for family and friends, my site, minecraft, quake, openttd, trss, gitea, drone.io, jenkins.

There is other stuff, but it is usually shortlived, i check it out, test it and most often discard it.

Poor design. It's been cobbled together slowly over the past 7 years. They built it to work only a certain way at first. But then somebody said, "oh, actually we forgot we need this other component too". But it didn't make sense with the current design. So they'd strap the new feature to the side with duct tape. Then they'd need another feature, and strap something else to the first strapped-on thing. Teams would ask for a new feature, and it would be shimmed in to the old design. All the while the design was led by an initial set of "opinionated" decisions that were inherently limiting. The end result is a mess that needs more and more abstraction. But this isn't a problem when you are already a billion-dollar company that can pay for other teams to build more abstractions and internal tools to deal with it.

This is business as usual in any quasi-monolithic Enterprise project. Typically the way you escape that scenario is to have major refactors where you can overhaul the design and turn your 50 abstractions into 5. But instead, K8s decided to have very small release and support windows. This way they can refactor things and obsolete features within a short time frame. The end result is you either stick with one version for eternity (a security/operability problem) or you will be upgrading and deal with breaking changes every year for eternity.

Install:

$ brew tap hashicorp/tap

$ brew install hashicorp/tap/nomad

Run:

$ nomad agent -dev

Start a job:

$ nomad job run example.nomad