The comparison is a bit misleading. As someone that has used both nomad and k8s at scale --
- Nomad is a scheduler. Clean and focused. It is very fast. I was an early user and encountered a number of bumps, but that's software. The people at Hashicorp are super sharp and lovely.
- K8s is a lot more. It includes a scheduler, but in the simplest sense, it is a complete control-plane based on the control-loop pattern. You have an API, a scheduler, a db, various controllers, etc. Forget for a moment that most people use it to orchestrate containers -- it's really designed to orchestrate anything. Its API is extensible, you can add and compose controllers -- there are many possibilities once you wrap your head around it.
This is all opinionated and includes a lot of capability. It's just very different.
You can stitch together nomad, consul, vault, and various glue to create a container orchestration system... but when you start wanting to manage the control-planes as though they are the "kind" (the container for example) with meta-control-planes, and you start wanting to orchestrate network, storage, and other dependencies... all while doing this in a multi-tenant environment, then things get interesting.
- Nomad is a scheduler. Clean and focused. It is very fast. I was an early user and encountered a number of bumps, but that's software. The people at Hashicorp are super sharp and lovely.
- K8s is a lot more. It includes a scheduler, but in the simplest sense, it is a complete control-plane based on the control-loop pattern. You have an API, a scheduler, a db, various controllers, etc. Forget for a moment that most people use it to orchestrate containers -- it's really designed to orchestrate anything. Its API is extensible, you can add and compose controllers -- there are many possibilities once you wrap your head around it.
This is all opinionated and includes a lot of capability. It's just very different.
You can stitch together nomad, consul, vault, and various glue to create a container orchestration system... but when you start wanting to manage the control-planes as though they are the "kind" (the container for example) with meta-control-planes, and you start wanting to orchestrate network, storage, and other dependencies... all while doing this in a multi-tenant environment, then things get interesting.
-charles.