CoreOS rkt or Container Linux was a rival to Docker that was acquired by Red Hat, then given to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). The project has since been discontinued.
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HashiCorp Nomad
Score 9.5 out of 10
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Nomad, from HashiCorp, is presented as a simple, flexible, and production-grade workload orchestrator that enables organizations to deploy, manage, and scale any application, containerized, legacy or batch jobs, across multiple regions, on private and public clouds. Nomad's workload support enables an organization to run containerized, non containerized, and batch applications through a single workflow. Nomad is available open source, or via a supported enterprise plan.
CoreOS rkt is well suited for any development environment where operating systems and hardware are not homogeneous. CoreOS rkt allows us to write code on one machine with the confidence that it will work on any other. This has been immensely helpful as our developers are often switching to the latest and greatest machines and operating systems. CoreOS rkt is less suited for environments that are not Software as a Service. There is often no need to bring the entire developer environment and associated dependencies when delivering a one time product. In these environments CoreOS rkt just adds unneeded overhead.
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.
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.
Docker, lxc, Ubuntu Snappy, partisan chroot+unshare Reformulating the problem and realizing a container is not necessary when a testing environment with clearly defined behavior.
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.
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).
