Nomad, from HashiCorp, is presented as a simple, flexible, and production-grade workload orchestrator that enables organizations to deploy, manage, and scale any application, containerized, legacy or batch jobs, across multiple regions, on private and public clouds. Nomad's workload support enables an organization to run containerized, non containerized, and batch applications through a single workflow. Nomad is available open source, or via a supported enterprise plan.
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Podman
Score 9.8 out of 10
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Podman is a daemonless container engine for developing, managing, and running OCI Containers on Linux Systems. Containers can either be run as root or in rootless mode. Podman is open source and free, supported and maintained by the Containers organization, with code available from GitHub.
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.
While it always depends on your use case, I believe security concerns of need for root user is a concern, so it is worth considering daemonless container service over Docker, which works just as good and has support for docker compose. Another good reason is the licensing for enterprise usage, which podman has no restrictions for. It’s also a great choice for OpenShift integration, which is seamless and works well with Rancher as well.
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.
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.
Podman is Daemonless, lightweight and doesn’t charge us for commercial usage, so it’s a relief for startups. Minikube and Rancher are a bit more complex for our use cases; so we keep things simple, fast and secure with Podman that can easily be managed with Podman Desktop and other works with our docker-compose based projects without issues.
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).