Welcome fellow technologist! As companies embrace modern application architectures, container orchestration has become essential for managing dynamic and distributed workloads. The two most popular options are Nomad and Kubernetes.
In this comprehensive guide, we’ll explore:
- Brief introductions to Nomad and Kubernetes
- Detailed side-by-side comparisons across 8 factors
- When to choose Nomad or Kubernetes based on your use case
- Conclusions on deciding what‘s best for your infrastructure
Let’s get started!
What is Nomad?
Created by HashiCorp, Nomad is a lightweight and flexible orchestration platform optimized for deploying a wide range of workloads like containers, non-containerized applications, batch jobs and more.
Over 35% of respondents on StackOverflow use Nomad for container management making it the 2nd most popular after Kubernetes. Large companies like Samsung, Jet, Roblox and IBM rely on Nomad in production for its simplicity at scale.
It handles automated deployment, scheduling, recovery from failures and resource allocation across infrastructure. You can run it on-prem or in the cloud. Key benefits are:
- Simple installation via single binary
- Supports apps spanning Docker, VM, Kubernetes, Mesos etc
- Advanced scheduler optimized for batch & service workloads
For small teams managing diverse workloads, Nomad is easy to get started with while handling impressive scale demands.
What is Kubernetes?
Originally designed by Google for internal use over a decade ago, Kubernetes (aka K8s) was open-sourced in 2014 and is now managed by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.
With over 90% market share, it‘s by far the most widely used container orchestration platform. Popular managed services like EKS, GKE and AKS have made running Kubernetes simpler for larger companies like Reddit, GitHub, Philips, Comcast and many more.
As an orchestrator purpose-built for complex container environments, Kubernetes excels at:
- Automated container deployment, scaling and management
- Service discovery, load balancing and robust networking built-in
- Vast ecosystem of integrations and community support
For container-focused teams running microservices, Kubernetes provides the most advanced and ubiquitous solution.
Now let‘s dive deeper into the technical details comparing Nomad vs Kubernetes.
Installation and Setup
Nomad uses a lightweight single binary for all its components totaling only 20MB. You can install it manually or via OS package managers like Apt, Homebrew etc with just a single command.
brew install nomadAdditional utilities like drivers and CLI tools come bundled together. This simplifies getting started fast without complex configurations.
Kubernetes has around 10 core components like kubelet, API server, scheduler, controller manager, etc. Each runs as a separate process and must be configured to work together.
Production grade setup involves securing communications, PKI infrastructure, high-availability, disaster recovery planning etc. There are over 50 YAML files needed to customize a hardened deployment.
Clearly, Nomad makes infrastructure setup far easier especially for smaller teams. But Kubernetes gives more fine-grained control.
Scalability
In a stress test benchmark, Nomad ran over 1 million containers on just 5,000 hosts spread across multiple AWS regions and availability zones.
It achieves this massive scale by using a lightweight gossip protocol where servers learn about state changes from peers locally instead of a centralized source. This allows fast convergence even across high latency networks.
Kubernetes officially supports up to 5000 nodes in a cluster as of version 1.24. The control plane must access persistent storage like etcd to track state which can become a limitation.
Managing Kubernetes at large scale also introduces complexity – upgrading, security hardening, blast radius during failures etc require more care and specialized expertise.
So if you need to maximize density and geo-distribution easily, Nomad is the superior choice today.
Performance and Resource Utilization
Since it runs as a single process instead of separate ones, Nomad is incredibly lightweight – using as little as 50MB RAM and minimal CPU even under load. It doesn‘t even require a dedicated node to run the server binary.
This allows packing more workloads per host without high resource overheads. For example, a cluster running Linux containers may only need 512MB to 1GB per node.
In contrast, a baseline Kubernetes installation itself consumes over 1GB RAM for running the control plane components and network plugins. Production setups often allocate 4GB+ RAM per node.
Clearly if optimizing infrastructure utilization and cost efficiency is critical, Nomad allows doing significantly more with fewer bare metal or cloud resources.
Networking Capabilities
A key area where Kubernetes shines over Nomad is networking. It has native integrations for:
- Pod-to-pod communications on localhost
- DNS-based service discovery
- Software load balancers
- Ingress controllers and route management
This makes service mesh architectures and complex network logic straightforward.
Nomad takes a simpler approach – it allocates host ports dynamically and relies more on host-level IP configurations and hardware load balancers if needed. This gives less control but reduces dependencies.
So for advanced microservices connectivity, Kubernetes networking cannot be beaten today due to ubiquitous ecosystem support.
Infrastructure Requirements
Let‘s analyze typical server hardware recommendations:
| **Nomad** | **Kubernetes** | |
| CPU Cores | 4-8 per server | At least 4 per node |
| Memory | 16-32 GB | 16GB+ per node |
| Storage | 40-80 GB | Dependent on apps |
Clearly Nomad has lower infrastructure demands allowing cutting cloud bills substantially.
Kubernetes nodes should also have high speed storage durable enough for cluster state. This makes managed offerings like EKS more compelling to avoid ops overhead.
Coding and Configurations
Nomad uses HCL (Hashicorp Configuration Language) for job and client specs while its Terraform provider allows infra-as-code. The syntax is clean, simple and easy to learn.
job "docs" {
datacenters = ["dc1"]
group "example" {
task "server" {
driver = "docker"
config {
image = "nginx:alpine"
}
}
}
}Kubernetes uses YAML/JSON for nearly everything. While familiar, configurations can become complex quickly in production. Helm charts are commonly used for packaging apps to simplify deployments.
So ease of use vs power is the core tradeoff. For rapid prototyping and smaller needs, Nomad lighter syntax helps. Kubernetes provides richer programmability for larger scale.
Integrations and Ecosystem
With Kubernetes orchestrating critical infrastructure for industry giants like Apple, Netflix, Uber and more – its ecosystem explodes with major integrations across monitoring, security, networking, storage etc from both open source and commercial providers.
Nomad take an approach of building targeted integrations optimized for scale, performance and ease-of-use rather than trying to match Kubernetes‘ vast scope. These include Consul, Vault, Terraform, Prometheus, Grafana and more.
So if you need access to a wide range of third party tools, then Kubernetes ecosystem cannot be matched currently. But Nomad focuses on quality over quantity.
GUIs and Visualization
Nomad ships with a built-in web UI accessible at port 4646. This gives an overview of clients, jobs, allocations, evaluations, servers etc across regions without added setup. Drill into details easily.
Kubernetes itself does not include a dashboard. The official but optional one needs manual installation and offers fairly basic cluster visibility. Managed services like EKS and GKE provide richer UIs.
So if GUIs are useful for your workflow, Nomad saves effort there.
Use Cases Where Nomad Wins
After our detailed analysis across factors, let‘s summarize scenarios where Nomad excels over Kubernetes:
- Fast setup & simplicity – less than 30 mins to production scale
- Non-containerized & batch workloads – VM, Windows, Java etc
- Cost optimized infrastructure – improves efficiency substantially
- Heavily constrained scheduling – custom bin packing algorithms
Nomad brings the power of orchestration to smaller teams with diverse needs or those running large, distributed simulations/data pipelines.
Use Cases Where Kubernetes Wins
Of course given Kubernetes leading market share, there are plenty of situations where it is unambiguously the better choice:
- Complex container environments – microservices, service mesh etc
- Multi-cloud and hybrid portability – EKS, AKS and GKE provide managed K8s
- Advanced networking needs – ingress routing, gRPC, etc
- Access to extensive integrations – leverage rich ecosystem
For container-first development teams leveraging CI/CD pipelines, Kubernetes has become the standard.
Key Takeaways – Evaluate Tradeoffs
There you have it – a comprehensive feature comparison between the two most popular orchestration platforms today.
The core tradeoffs are simplicity vs advanced configurability. For greenfield projects, start with your application architecture, scale and networking requirements.
- Building microservices on containers? Go Kubernetes.
- Need fast infrastructure wins? Pick Nomad.
As cloud native methodologies become ubiquitous, both platforms will continue advancing rapidly. Hopefully this guide has demystified their capabilities so you can make an informed decision based on your use case.
Please reach out with any other questions!
