Likelihood to Recommend 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 SUSE Rancher as a management tool becomes useful on a larger scale. Small deployments not so much. If someone also requires Kubernetes capacity or storage, Rancher is an excellent choice. Also, without Kubernetes' skills, it is unlikely that Rancher deployment is going to be a success. Then again if someone else is managing your Kubernetes capacity, setting up the software's capacity will yield greater control. Rancher is not a very integrated solution similar to others in the market.
Read full review Pros 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 Public and private cloud infrastructure providers based on K8s CAPI REST API that can be used to integrate company services with Rancher GUI that is easy to learn and use in daily operations Builtin GitOps automation solution based on Fleet project It is fully open source Szymon Madej DevOps Architect for Containerization Platforms and Microservices
Read full review Cons 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 No possibility to snapshot Projects. You can snapshot and restore the whole Kubernetes cluster, but not a Project or Namespace. For this, you have to use external tools. You cannot detach the Rancher-created Kubernetes clusters from Rancher management. Read full review Usability The usability and user experience are good in general, although sometimes some errors can cause confusion, especially for those users who are not experts.
Read full review Support Rating Use cases can be complex hence support as well. Problems have been solvable, but not always easily. It's great that there is support!
Read full review Alternatives Considered 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 As we use only AWS EKS Clusters originally we were using the AWS Console and CLI but that is too limited in scope. Also, we were using AWS IAM roles to provide access to users but that was lots of extra work to have them integrated into SSO while on Rancher we have just connected our GitHub login with the Alfresco organization and that uses, in turn, Okta for SSO so provisioning for access is automatic for any developer who has been assigned to GitHub.
Read full review Contract Terms and Pricing Model The investment for small environments is quite significant. There has to be a compelling case to enhance the areas where SUSE Rancher brings in value to make such a financial leap. There is also a free version to test the value propositions, which will help support the user's buying decisions. More clusters, more volume, more tasks and more complexity in the environment equals more value that Rancher can provide.
Read full review Return on Investment 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 Shortens "Time-to-Market" factor for new business applications or implementing new functionalities. From 1 to 50 microservices-based business applications in 6 years. 24/7 availability, generates more money. There are many infrastructure components that are regularly powered-off for maintenance or upgrade, bur we rarely are turning off our downstream Kubernetes clusters where our business applications lives. Single Point of Contact with platform maintenance and development Team, eases implementation of new business applications Szymon Madej DevOps Architect for Containerization Platforms and Microservices
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