Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) vs. HashiCorp Nomad

[Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)] is great when you need to be able to deploy a large number of services in a highly repeatable way. Once you know how to use it, it is a very fast to stand up a new environment. However there is a lot you need to know to get to that point and it is a specialized area. This is not suitable for small teams who are supporting multiple product stacks.

Incentivized

Nomad is well suited for organizations who wish to tackle the problem of cloud computing with as little opinion as possible. Where competing tools like Kubernetes limit the concept of "batteries included," Nomad relies on engineers understanding the missing components and filling them in as necessary. The benefit of Nomad is the ability to build a system out of small pieces with the cost of having more complexity at a system level compared to alternatives.

Incentivized

• To scale the microservices very easily.
• Easy to set up in CI/CD pipeline.
• It has a good pricing option as well in Azure. Basic works fine.
• Accelerates containerized application development for the developers.

Incentivized

• Nomad is incredibly simple by nature, following the Linux philosophy of doing one thing great. That one thing for Nomad is job scheduling.
• Nomad is a modern tool, written in Go with a large community and maintained by HashiCorp.
• Implementation of Nomad is very simple since it is a single binary.

Incentivized

• GUI on azure portal need to enhanced.
• The feature set should be matching with Openshift which is also kubernetes based
• Troubleshooting errors

Incentivized

• Nomad only handles one part of a full platform. Expertise and vision are required in implementing an entire system that is functional enough for an organization to rely on. This includes other tools to handle things like secrets, service discovery, network routing, etc.
• Nomad is delayed in some modern functionality, like features for service-mesh and open tracing. These features are on the tool's roadmap, but there's currently no native support. These paradigms can be established still, but require more expertise outside of Nomad itself.
• Nomad is not the leading tool for this space, and as such risks being left behind by tools with much greater support, such as Kubernetes.

Incentivized

Barring certain missing features such as operator management , open cluster management, it does gives lot of options to host containerized applications. The GUI may be improved and can give user more insights to the cluster rather than using command line tools. The integration with standard azure monitoring tools is a big plus to use Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)

Incentivized

Microsoft support was really good, whenever we raise any ticket they come back to us within a couple of hours.

Incentivized

Worked with very similar in-house-built Kubernetes/container management system. We are leveraging AKS as it's more robust and stable being in the technical space for quite some time. Also, it has got a vast number of management and security features which makes it more attractive. They even have a model where the cost can be reduced by up to 90% if the application can afford to handle a quick downtime once in a while.

Incentivized

Nomad's primary competitor is Kubernetes, specifically its scheduling component. Kubernetes is a much more complete system that will handle more things than job scheduling, including service discovery, secrets management, and service routing. There also exists a much larger community support for Kubernetes vs Nomad. One might say Kubernetes is the safer choice between the two. Kubernetes is the complete "operating system" for cloud computing, but with it includes complexities that are "Kubernetes" specific. The decision really comes down to a mindset of monolith vs components. With Kubernetes, I would argue you choose the entire system as a whole. With Nomad, you design your system piece by piece. There is no wrong answer.

Incentivized

• The ability to scale has reduced the need for headcount in IT
• The authentication process has kept us compliant with regulatory bodies
• The ability to replicate environments is great.

Incentivized

• Nomad has allowed our organization to deploy quicker and more frequently with a lower failure rate.
• Nomad has brought in consistency from an operations perspective.
• Nomad's performance allows us to scale infinitely while providing functionality that reduces mean time to repair (canary deploys, versioning, rollbacks, etc).

Incentivized