Is Nomad taking over Kubernetes?

5 min readApr 8, 2022

As per current market status most of us agree that Kubernetes (Aka ‘K8s’) won the container orchestration battle, triumphing over alternatives like Docker Swarm and Mesos. Maybe this is old news but there is one parallel player sailing over the sea at the same time of K8s (2014)but not in radar of many techies that is Hashicorp' S Nomad. (2015)

Incubated from Google and with continued community support Kubernetes is de facto for container orchestration. Yet, Kubernetes is not a solution for all use cases. As many developers around mentioning about complexity with new features, developer experience qualms & security misconfigurations as potential roadblocks to implementation. It’s not that these issues can’t be overcome, but most users admit Kubernetes’s inherent complexity makes onboarding to the platform and securing it rather chaos.

This blog is to get insights how nomad can be used over K8s.

What is Nomad really?

Nomad is an orchestration tool from Hashicorp that allows users to deploy and manage different types of applications, such as:

Supports Containers (With or Without Docker)
Supports legacy application stack.
Supports microservices applications.
Supports batch applications.

Viewed from above, Nomad looks like this

Am not stepping to explain the architecture part or something!

Let’s stick to the point.

What makes Nomad useful is a rich set of APIs that:

help us to automate deployments, app scaling and upgrades.
empower developers to manage deployments directly.
automatically manage failures.
hide complex details such as node management, letting users choose only what is needed to have the application up and running.

As mentioned earlier, Docker is supported, but any type of application can be used, on whatever type of operating system is needed (Linux, Windows, BSD and OSX are all supported). Clusters can be created, adding nodes from different data centers and/or different regions.

Finally, Nomad is a highly scalable tool that allows users to exceed the limits of the standard concept of scaling; indeed, the developers used a case study named “the million container challenge”.

Why Nomad?

The main difference between Nomad and Kubernetes is that Nomad is more versatile and lightweight. Nomad can work just as a simple task scheduler or take on heavier orchestration roles according to the project specifications. Nomad is part of a suite composed of complementary tools produced by Hashicorp:

· Terraform, for fast infrastructure development

· Consul, for automatic service networking

· Vault, Hashicorp’ s secrets management tool

Kubernetes vs. Nomad: Side-by-Side Comparison

Kubernetes is an end-to-end container orchestration platform that relies on a dynamic ecosystem of various loosely coupled components. Nomad is architecturally much simpler, though offers the same features a robust orchestrator offers. The two platforms share several features and differ in several ways. Let us take a closer look.

Kubernetes vs Nomad: Similarities

Kubernetes and Nomad are both open-source tools that are built for container orchestration and to support similar use cases. As a result, both carry a number of common features:

Kubernetes vs Nomad: Differences

Though both platforms are meant for container orchestration, Nomad and Kubernetes have a few fundamental differences,

Kubernetes vs Nomad: Pros and Cons

Which one to choose ?

Conclusion

Kubernetes is a self-contained orchestration tool with many built-in services that provide all the features you need to run a container-based application. It has the more impressive contributor community and cloud support, providing a rich toolkit and a large number of out-of-the-box solutions. However, it is difficult to set up manually and is designed for containerized applications only.

In contrast, Nomad is easy to install and operate because it only focuses on cluster management. It also supports various types of workloads, but it offers limited functionality, which requires the installation of third-party tools to solve tasks that Kubernetes implements by default.

If your applications require additional features and you’re comfortable taking the time to learn the tool, then Kubernetes may be the better choice. However, if you prefer a more straightforward workflow without added functionality, then Nomad may be right for your applications. Ultimately, which tool you choose depends on your use case and your ability to implement the tool into your production cycle. Be sure to take the above factors into account when making your decision for 2022.

Yet, the unique flavors of managed services make multi-cloud challenging to support. It requires substantial reconfiguration to migrate a workload from EKS to GKE, Li says. With some layers over Kubernetes, when something goes wrong, it could require double the effort to figure out problems, she adds. Kubernetes managed services or other container orchestration tools that hide operational complexity mustn’t cause additional troubleshooting.

“Organizations tend to chose an orchestrator based on their product, budget and timeline,” said Li. “It’s never one tool fits all.”