Likelihood to Recommend The Google
Kubernetes Engine clusters are very good at being a managed cloud K8s platform - lots of documentation, features, and updates are available. It's also newbie-friendly - for both administrators and developers. Unfortunately, currently, it cannot reach true zero scale - thus, costs (rent for the service) are still involved even if you are barely using it. Thankfully, it's possible to have alternatives in Google Cloud:
Your own K8s cluster on Compute Engine VMs - you manage it completely; it will have access to a lot of Google Cloud services. Cloud Run cluster - less documented but more flexible Anthos clusters - you can use this service for a lot of types of K8s clusters - Google Kubernetes Engine, Cloud Run, on-prem, AWS, Azure Read full review 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.
Read full review Pros Deployment of a new GKE cluster is really fast in comparison to other cloud providers. GCP is ahead other vendors and always provide the most up to date Kubernetes version. GKE automation for master upgrade and the worker nodes pool works really well. Read full review 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. Read full review Cons Not as intuitive as it could be Documentation could be better, especially for people using other Google Cloud tools Not the preferred Kubernetes Engine for many apps Read full review 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. Read full review Usability Google Kubernetes Engine has a good UI and documentation that facilitates setup and helps get projects moving along quickly Its built-in logging integrations with StackDriver make it easier to monitor the application and log issues quickly Automated orchestration, deployment, and scaling of nodes and networking are all easily configurable with yaml files Read full review Support Rating Very good
Kubernetes distribution with a reasonable total price. Integration with storage and load balancer for ingress and services speed up every process deployment.
Read full review Alternatives Considered GKE spins up new nodes a LOT faster than AKS. GKE's auto scaler runs a lot smoother than AKS. GKE has a lot more
Kubernetes features baked in natively.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Professional Services When issues came up, we reached out to some folks at GCP and they seemed to be very prompt and attentive to our needs. They were always willing to help and provide additional details or recommendations or links to resources. This kind of support is very helpful as it allows us to navigate GKE with more confidence. Read full review Return on Investment Positive: Allowed us to start and produce working software regardless of our experience level. Positive: Integration with other Google Cloud services that we wanted to use anyway. Negative: It's kinda clunky, and some scenarios seem Google Kubernetes Engine-specific instead of being more integrated with other Google Cloud services or the web UI. Read full review 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). Read full review ScreenShots