HashiCorp Nomad vs. Microsoft Azure IoT Edge

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

Deployment of mission critical business support solutions particularly those that support virtual learning and video conferencing environments. This is because they help organisations such as the university to effectively transition to a digitally compliant organisation.

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

• It works even if there is no internet at client location. It will record all the generated data and only send them to cloud storage when there is internet connection.
• It allows you to bring cloud functionality down to Edge location in the form of docker container.
• It also supports two way communication from device to cloud and vice-versa.

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

• For some reason, the containerized architecture was also making this very hard
• Had some issues when debugging edge modules, needs a professional grade remote debugging
• Industrial automation still requires attention. OPC-UA was good but Modbus or custom PLCs etc was painful to set up

Incentivized

Most of the time it works perfectly, does not require any attention, but when there is a problem, it's really hard to diagnose it. I think the documentation for the positive scenarios are good on the Microsoft side, but for negative scenarios, I don't think there is enough community help out there, in my opinion.

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 reason Behind this is the cost, as Microsoft provides solutions and integrations of services cheaper than AWS.

• 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

• Very valuable return on investment for IT capex committed to the deployment
• Improvements in overall organisational efficiency and agility
• Repositioning the organisation to become digitally transformed

Incentivized