Comment by proxysna | Hacker News Reader

Comment by proxysna | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Nomad also scales really well. In my experience swarm had a lot of issues with going above 10 machines in a cluster. Stuck containers, containers that are there but swarm can't see them and more. But still i loved using swarm with my 5 node arm cluster, it is a good place to start when you hit the limit of a single node.

> The only serious downsides is having to use the HCL DSL ( https://github.com/hashicorp/hcl ) and their web UI being read only in the last versions that i checked.

1. IIRC you can run jobs directly from UI now, but IMO this is kinda useless. Running a job is simple as 'nomad run jobspec.nomad'. You can also run a great alternative UI ( https://github.com/jippi/hashi-ui ).

2. IMO HCL > YAML for job definitions. I've used both extensively and HCL always felt much more human friendly. The way K8s uses YAML looks to me like stretching it to it's limits and barely readable at times with templates.

One thing that makes nomad a go-to for me is that it is able to run workloads pretty much anywhere. Linux, Windows, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Illumos and ofc Mac.

Recently I've been moving both my personal stuff and work stuff to Nomad and HCL is just SO much nicer than the convoluted YAML files that Kubernetes needs.

I know HCL gets a lot of hate around here but I find just dandy and I'd rather write HCL over YAML any day of the week.

Also to just put another thumbs up for Nomad because it's been absolutely fantastic for us and has been so much easier to manage and deploy. We've begun testing edge deployments with it as well and so far looks very promising.

Consul and Vault are also two Hasicorp products I can't live without at this point either. Vault is probably one of the first things I deploy now.

Anyway rambling, I think a lot of people just immediately jump to Kubernetes without really ever giving Nomad a look first.

Hmm, what are your thoughts on the Compose format (that's used in Docker Compose and Docker Swarm)?

I agree that the format Kubernetes uses is probably a bit overcomplicated, which is why I've also sometimes used the aforementioned Compose format with tools like Kompose to save some of my time.

In that regard, it's perhaps not the fault of YAML itself (even though the format has its own complexity problems), but rather of the tool using it.

What personally keeps me away from HCL for the most part is the fact that a lot of the time you can find Compose files for various pieces of software online and only have to change some parameters for the most part to get stuff running vs having to rewrite all of it in a different format.

Are there any Compose to HCL tools out there yet?

Yeah, you are right. It is not exactly YAML's fault but how it is used. I am ok with using it with ansible/salt/compose. But k8s is stretching it to it's limits and makes it cumbersome to use.

And yeah, there is not much examples of HCL files for different software, but most of the time there is not much to adapt. Usually when i need to run something, i just take some random HCL file i have and substitute the docker image, edit the amount of resources and add storage and config via templates. And done. It might be confusing/intimidating at first, but like with anything after some time you should be ok.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com