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Ask HN: Why aren't you just using nomad for container scheduling?

8 points by tekno45 ↗ HN
How many of you just have simple services that aren't using service discovery, aren't using any advanced kubernetes features.

Nomad is super simple to setup and if you just want some ec2 instances that will take containers and find a spot for them its a much faster solution than a kubernetes cluster.

5 comments

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tekno45
Having simple access to windows machines that you're chained to gives a lot of flexibility and makes your CI pipeline more uniform.

Are there any companies hiring and training nomad engineers? Any consultant companies?

cpach
What is Nomad?
tekno45
Nomad is Hashicorp's container scheduler, a much simpler kubernetes.

Does task scheduling across nodes, out of the box and super easy to scale.

Kubernetes is just so big and you need to know a bit about a lot to make sure you know what the system is doing.

WnZ39p0Dgydaz1
I really wanted to try Nomad and switch from Kubernetes but I eventually went back to using Kubernetes.

To run a Nomad cluster that is feature comparable to a Kubernetes cluster you also need to maintain Consul and Vault. With that it's no longer so simple to setup/maintain. A minimal Kubernetes distribution (k3s) is significantly simpler - a single command and you're up and running locally or on EC2.

The other problem with Nomad are unknown unknowns. The community has established Kubernetes as somewhat of a standard. This means you can find many pre-built applications (Helm charts) and solutions to common problems. With Nomad, I need to build everything from scratch. That's fine for extremely simple things like single containers deployments, but anything with more complex requirements, e.g. something similar to a small Kafka cluster, takes significant effort.

I found k3s + spot instances to be a great solution. It works beautifully and is fault-tolerant across spot restarts.

imglorp
We are an application vendor delivering to customer prem and cloud. Most of our customers either have Kubernetes already and want us to deploy there, or they have heard it's in fashion and want us to help them deploy it. It's a checkbox on our marketing glossy.

Nomad would be ideal for our app if it was up to us. Much respect for all the Hashi things, but we can't always use them.