Docker vs. HashiCorp Nomad vs. Helm

You are going to be able to find the most resources and examples using Docker whenever you are working with a container orchestration software like Kubernetes. There will always some entropy when you run in a container, a containerized application will never be as purely performant as an app running directly on the OS. However, in most scenarios this loss will be negligible to the time saved in deployment, monitoring, etc.

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

If you need to automate the deployment of environments in Kubernetes and these environments should be easily replicable in other regions of your cloud provider or even in other cloud providers, then this is the tool for you. Just be prepared for a certain degree of complexity when creating the charts.

Incentivized

• Packaging of application to limit the space occupied
• Ease of running the application
• Provide multiple ways to handle the application issues and integration of different components like pipeline, ansible, terraform etc

• 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

• Templates - The ability to create templates is really helpful and help creates a baseline for package management.
• Rollbacks - it is godsend. Period.
• Dry-run - This really is helpful when troubleshooting deployments and is great for testing out new charts as well.

Incentivized

• Docker hub image retention policy can be relaxed
• Docker hub policies can be more developer friendly
• Docker CLI help section can be improved
• Image and container storage (local) management can be optimized

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

• concurrent deployments
• templating values files

Incentivized

I have been using Docker for more than 3 years and it really simplifies the modern application development and deployment. I like the ability of Docker to improve efficiency, portability and scalability for developers and operations teams. Another reason for giving this rating is because Docker integrates CI/CD pipelines very well

Incentivized

Haven't seen any outages, fatal/unrecoverable errors in my usage so far. Enough said.

Incentivized

Docker Desktop. The CPU high usage is a known issue. Needs fixing. Otherwise, it is great overall. Would not use anything else still.

Incentivized

We didn't really need support, but the open-source community seemed responsive and informative when it came to issues. Many cloud native consultancy companies (including ourselves) offer support for Helm.

Incentivized

The reason why we are still using Docker right now is due to that is the best among its peers and suits our needs the best. However, the trend we foresee for the future might indicate Amazon lambda could potentially fit our needs to code enviornmentless in the near future.

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

We have a natural trending to use what is a reference in its space and Helm has being leader in its area for a long time. Since it has all features we need didn't make sense to us to invest time on researching and testing other alternatives, so Helm was our first and only tool in regards of automating deployments on Kubernetes

Incentivized

It is the only tool in our toolset that has not [had] any issues so far. That is really a mark of reliability, and it's a testimony to how well the product is made, and a tool that does its job well is a tool well worth having. It is the base tool that I would say any organisation must have if they do scalable deployment.

Incentivized

• Reduces the number of virtual machine which impacted our quarterly billing
• Using docker with proxy we run multiple application on same port on same host.
• impact on billing is we have to provide docker training to the people who are working on it.

• 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

• Reduction in human effort.
• Streamline software versions and upgrades.

Incentivized