github.com/smintz/nomad@v0.8.3/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 containers originally designed by Google, now governed by the Cloud Native
    12  Computing Foundation (CNCF) and developed by Google, Red Hat, CoreOS and many others. Kubernetes aims to provide all the features needed to run Docker or Rkt-based applications including cluster management,
    13  scheduling, service discovery, monitoring, secrets management and more.
    14  
    15  Nomad only aims to provide cluster management and scheduling and is designed
    16  with the Unix philosophy of having a small scope while composing with tools like [Consul](https://www.consul.io)
    17  for service discovery and [Vault](https://www.vaultproject.io) for secret management.
    18  
    19  While Kubernetes is specifically focused on Docker, Nomad is more general purpose.
    20  Nomad supports virtualized, containerized and standalone applications, including Docker.
    21  Nomad is designed with extensible drivers and support will be extended to all
    22  common drivers.
    23  
    24  Kubernetes is designed as a collection of more than a half-dozen interoperating
    25  services which together provide the full functionality. Coordination and
    26  storage is provided by etcd at the core. The state is wrapped by API controllers
    27  which are consumed by other services that provide higher level APIs for features
    28  like scheduling. Kubernetes supports running in a highly available
    29  configuration but is operationally complex to setup.
    30  
    31  Nomad is architecturally much simpler. Nomad is a single binary, both for clients
    32  and servers, and requires no external services for coordination or storage.
    33  Nomad combines a lightweight resource manager and a sophisticated scheduler
    34  into a single system. By default, Nomad is distributed, highly available,
    35  and operationally simple.
    36  
    37  Kubernetes documentation states they can support clusters greater than 5,000 nodes
    38  and they support a multi-AZ/multi-region configuration. Nomad has been tested
    39  on clusters up to 5,000 nodes, but is expected to work on much larger clusters as
    40  well. Nomad also supports multi-datacenter and multi-region configurations.