[akvadrako]

I never heard of Nomad, but I can't see why I would choose it over the much more popular and standardised k8s.

The biggest benefits seem to be

(1) simplicity, but GCE and minikube are easy enough to learn in a day and

(2) ability to run non-containers, but docker containers are generic - they can run java apps just fine.

[zie]

I would argue the biggest strength is maintainability. Managing and keeping up a distributed cluster with k8s is WORK. If you are not at the scale where you can dedicate full-time staff to managing only k8s, you shouldn't even be touching k8s. You need full-time staff to keep it alive.

Nomad is operationally simple, you can run it out of your normal devops roles, you don't need dedicated staff. Mostly because you can pretty easily wrap your head around what it does and how it works.

This saves you bundles of cash and time.

[akvadrako]

I don't see why - I have my GCE cluster running fine with zero maintenance work.

[zie]

Zero maintenance work implies you are not doing security patches or upgrades, so as soon as you have a problem, not only will you be left holding the now broken pieces, nobody will have any reason to help or support you, unless you pay them $$$$$$'s(and even then.... maybe not).

I hope whatever you are running under k8s isn't crucial or important, and I really hope I'm not a customer of whatever you "operate".

Maintenance is real, that applies to everything if you want it to work reliably for any length of time. There are various ways to handle maintenance, do a little consistently and constantly (what most of us professionals do) or do large bulk-replacements every X time (like when stuff crashes and burns - and nobody can remember how to fix it, so they just replace it with whatever is new and shiny).

[kureikain]

I second to this. Setting up K8S is a walk in the part.

Upgrading it is hard. Especially with stuff like Kafka/ZooKeeper run on a K8S cluster.

[kemitche]

GCE is a hosted k8s. Google does the maintenance for you, to my understanding.

[zie]

AH! sorry. I didn't realize Google started offering hosted k8s.. That def. keeps maintenance down, since Google does it for you. It's been a while since I've dug into k8s in depth.

[ownagefool]

Google, Amazon, Microsoft and IBM all offer managed kubernetes.

[brianwawok]

have you ever used google hosted k8s?

I am a 1 man shop. I manage my cluster in ~10 minutes per month.

[zie]

AH! sorry. I didn't realize Google started offering hosted k8s.. That def. keeps maintenance down, since Google does it for you. It's been a while since I've dug into k8s in depth.

[brianwawok]

Has to be a good year or so? Been a while.

AWS is the new one, just started a few weeks ago.

[erkkie]

One huge benefit of nomad is that it can schedule non containers too, enabling fixing up legacy systems incrementally.