[trabant00]

Nomad looks useful to me for use cases that have nothing to do with "a simple k8s" but more with distributed/HA systemd and cron.

Just deployed a small 3 node cluster in prod last week for this: run some binaries with some parameters, make sure they restart on failure, have them move to another node if one fails or is rebooted, and don't waste resources by having a classical active/passive 2 node setup that doesn't scale either.

It took me a couple of days to read the documentation which is good but not always up to date (I did have to dig in some github issues in one case), create a test setup and check failure scenarios. Gotta say I'm mostly impressed.

[humblepie]

How easy is setting up nomad for this? Does this need a consul cluster too?

[marvinblum]

Yes, Nomad does not include the service mesh, so you need to set up Consul too. Setting up Consul is a little harder than Nomad, but still simple, and Nomad will integrate with it without additional configuration, so it "just works" when it discovers the Consul service.

[trabant00]

It took me 2 work days to read the docs, tutorials setup and tests. I had no prior knowledge of Nomad. So I would say it was very easy. Consul is optional, for my use case I did not use/need it.