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| layout | page_title | sidebar_current | description |
|---|---|---|---|
| intro | Nomad vs. Kubernetes | vs-other-kubernetes | Comparison between Nomad and Kubernetes |
Nomad vs. Kubernetes
Kubernetes is an orchestration system for Docker developed by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). Kubernetes aims to provide all the features needed to run Docker based applications including cluster management, scheduling, service discovery, monitoring, secrets management and more.
Nomad only aims to provide cluster management and scheduling and is designed with the Unix philosophy of having a small scope while composing with tools like Consul for service discovery and Vault for secret management.
While Kubernetes is specifically focused on Docker, Nomad is more general purpose. Nomad supports virtualized, containerized and standalone applications, including Docker. Nomad is designed with extensible drivers and support will be extended to all common drivers.
Kubernetes is designed as a collection of more than a half-dozen interoperating services which together provide the full functionality. Coordination and storage is provided by etcd at the core. The state is wrapped by API controllers which are consumed by other services that provide higher level APIs for features like scheduling. Kubernetes supports running in a highly available configuration but is operationally complex to setup.
Nomad is architecturally much simpler. Nomad is a single binary, both for clients and servers, and requires no external services for coordination or storage. Nomad combines a lightweight resource manager and a sophisticated scheduler into a single system. By default, Nomad is distributed, highly available, and operationally simple.
At the time of writing, Kubernetes targets managing 100 node clusters and supports only a single region, although work is underway to improve scale and federation of clusters. Nomad is designed to support clusters several orders of magnitude larger and supports multi-datacenter and multi-region configurations.