[McSwag]

I’ve been using it in production for many years and I agree that it’s vastly simpler than kubernetes, by many orders of magnitude. I’m currently migrating off of it because I reached a point where I needed more enterprise-y features for not a ton of money such as rbac, federation, multi-tenant isolation, resource quotas, and less-often mentioned, hireability (it’s easier to hire for since more people have had exposure to it). HashiCorps enterprise products are also notoriously expensive.

Kubernetes has a lot of merits and open source community support which is attractive which means out of the box integrations are vast.

That said, Nomad builds in a lot of sensible default behaviors that are way way closer to production ready with significantly less effort. Many things in Nomad, with Consul and Vault “just work” like you’d expect. Some of it seems like magic.

Kubernetes on the other hand does almost nothing for you to make your custom app production ready out of the box. This means there’s a ton of room for error and incorrectly configured applications. CNIs, Ingress, PodAffinity, PodDisruptionBudgets, Services, HPAs, ServiceRoles, Secrets management are not defined for you and must be exactly correct or orchestrated in clunky and obscure ways, or a ton of effort needs to go into filling these gaps. “Just use EKS/GKE” quickly becomes a list of subsequent decision trees and you need to hope yoy made the right decision because if you don’t your choice will be deprecated in 6-9 months.

The two config options for Kubernetes are Helm/Kustomize Yaml. Both are great for quick POCs but at production scale are completely inferior to HCL and generally an absolute nightmare to work with on the day-to-day.

If I’m a team of one in a startup, I’d choose Nomad.