[nmaggioni]

> Nomad isn’t much better (or free)

"Better" is quite subjective, in my experience I've had workloads that were a breeze to setup in Nomad and painful enough to replicate in K8S that I haven't followed through with the latter. That is especially true in a home server/lab environment where things change and break all the time. I still run Nomad and K3S back-to-back to re-evaluate them periodically for my production needs, but so far my take on the matter hasn't changed.

"Free" puzzles me as well. Free as in open and hackable? The source and buildfiles are all publicly available, hack away to your heart's content. Free as in free beer? The same concept still applies, and if paid support is being referred to here, how's that different from paying any cloud provider to use their managed K8S services?

[nullwarp]

Yeah I find "better" quite subjective too as I tend to find Nomad better in almost every way and I run both k3s and Nomad as well, both at home and professionally.

Also the "Enterprise" features of Nomad aren't really something a home server user is going to need in the first place (Multiregion Deployments? Doubtful. Non voting servers? Also no)

[bantunes]

Hey, author here. I meant "free" as in full featured - I remember Nomad having features that I quite liked behind the Enterprise paywall.

[KronisLV]

Ahh, i feel like this is probably the case for most of the corporation backed software out there - apparently offering just support isn't always a viable strategy to remain in business, so many out there lock bits of more advanced functionality behind pay walls: like many of the features of GitLab (https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/gitlab-com/feature-comparis...) and something like Artifactory (https://www.jfrog.com/confluence/display/JFROG/Artifactory+C...)

I'm not sure whether that's a bad thing, though, since the alternative would be having no free plans/editions for those pieces of software at all, or maybe just using them for a few years and the company going bankrupt.

[nmaggioni]

Thanks for chiming in. Any chance that you tried an older, pre-v1.0 version? I used to share some of your considerations, but lately I've seen Nomad evolve at a quicker pace and catch up with some of the features I wanted/liked (ex.: readiness checks were introduced in May 2021 with v1.1, going by the changelog).

As others have already said and basing on the official docs (https://www.nomadproject.io/docs/enterprise), the few Enterprise-only features left don't really feel necessary to me for small-medium deployments; especially when there's an Ops team that can oversee things anyway.

Not trying to play the devil's advocate here, I'm genuinely interested in what I might be missing with my current approach.