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Comment by cpitman | Hacker News Reader

This one is interesting to me. I've been a big proponent of Hashicorp's other tooling, but this seems like an area that other projects are already addressing (and doing well in). Choice is great, but I think I would have preferred if they joined up with Kubernetes/Mesos/etc.

Also, their messaging seems a little ingenious. Otto talks about how important it is to support microservice development and deployment, but Nomad lists as a con that Kubernetes has too many separately deployed and composed services.

PS, I do work for Red Hat, so maybe I'm a little biased.

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Also, their messaging seems a little disingenuous. Otto talks about how important it is to support microservice development and deployment, but Nomad lists as a con that Kubernetes has too many separately deployed and composed services.

This is consistent with a (reasonable) belief that microservice architecture is an important design pattern to support, but may not be the best approach for all problems. From reading the docs, my sense is that Nomad takes the position that for a cluster scheduler, fewer moving parts leads to lower operational overhead, which outweighs any benefit that microservices may bring. E.g., it's more difficult to deploy a microservice platform like Nomad if the platform itself is deployed as a set of microservices.

I think there's definitely a bootstrapping problem here: microservices are great if you have something like Kubernetes, Nomad, Mesos etc. on which to run and deploy them, but you have to run your platform on something and be able to bring it back up if it goes down and that's where I think Nomad might have the edge.

Agree (Kubernetes and OpenShift dev here) - OpenShift is actually bundled as a monolithic Go binary that contains the full Kubernetes stack and client, the Openshift admin client, user client, and js web console for exactly that reason (even though it is all technically micro services on the server side). The single binary comes with downsides (binary is 95M) but it makes the "try it out" flow much, much, easier to see it all working. But the converse is true - you have to be able to decouple those bits at scale, and you eventually will want to start leveraging the platform to run itself.

Did you mean ingenious? Or disingenuous?

Ha, you are correct, I meant disingenuous.

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