github.com/dkerwin/nomad@v0.3.3-0.20160525181927-74554135514b/website/source/intro/vs/kubernetes.html.md (about) 1 --- 2 layout: "intro" 3 page_title: "Nomad vs. Kubernetes" 4 sidebar_current: "vs-other-kubernetes" 5 description: |- 6 Comparison between Nomad and Kubernetes 7 --- 8 9 # Nomad vs. Kubernetes 10 11 Kubernetes is an orchestration system for Docker developed by the Cloud Native 12 Computing Foundation (CNCF). Kubernetes aims to provide all the features 13 needed to run Docker based applications including cluster management, 14 scheduling, service discovery, monitoring, secrets management and more. 15 16 Nomad only aims to provide cluster management and scheduling and is designed 17 with the Unix philosophy of having a small scope while composing with tools like [Consul](https://www.consul.io) 18 for service discovery and [Vault](https://www.vaultproject.io) for secret management. 19 20 While Kubernetes is specifically focused on Docker, Nomad is more general purpose. 21 Nomad supports virtualized, containerized and standalone applications, including Docker. 22 Nomad is designed with extensible drivers and support will be extended to all 23 common drivers. 24 25 Kubernetes is designed as a collection of more than a half-dozen interoperating 26 services which together provide the full functionality. Coordination and 27 storage is provided by etcd at the core. The state is wrapped by API controllers 28 which are consumed by other services that provide higher level APIs for features 29 like scheduling. Kubernetes supports running in a highly available 30 configuration but is operationally complex to setup. 31 32 Nomad is architecturally much simpler. Nomad is a single binary, both for clients 33 and servers, and requires no external services for coordination or storage. 34 Nomad combines a lightweight resource manager and a sophisticated scheduler 35 into a single system. By default, Nomad is distributed, highly available, 36 and operationally simple. 37 38 Kubernetes documentation states they can support clusters greater than 1,000 nodes 39 and they support a multi-AZ/multi-region configuration. Nomad has been tested 40 on clusters up to 5,000 nodes, but is expected to work on much larger clusters as 41 well. Nomad also supports multi-datacenter and multi-region configurations.