I’d wager that like half the teams (at least) using kubernetes today should be using Nomad instead. Like the team I’m on now where I’m literally the only one familiar with Kubernetes and everyone else only has familiarity with more classic EC2-based patterns. Getting someone to even know what Helm does is its own uphill battle. Nomad is a lot more simple. That’s what I like about it a lot.
For better or for worse its a orchestrator (for containers/scripts/jars/baremetal) full stop.
Everything else is composable from the rest of the hashicorp stack consul(service mesh and discovery),vault(secrets) allowing you to use as much/or as little as you need and truly able to scale to a large deployment as needed.
In the plus column , picking up its config/admin is intuitive in a way that helm/k8s never really comes across.
Philosophy wise can put it int the unix way of doing things - it does one thing well and gets out of your way , and you add to it as you need/want.
Whereas k8s/heml etc have one way or the high way - leaving you fighting the deployment half the time.
Mitchel Hashimoto was a genius when it came to opinionated design and that was Hashicorp's biggest strength when it was part of their culture.
It's a shame Nomad couldn't overcome the K8s hype-wagon, but either way IBM is destroying everything good about Hashicorp's products and I would proceed with extreme caution deploying any of their stuff net-new right now...
I heard good things about Nomad (albeit from before Hashicorp changed their licenses): https://developer.hashicorp.com/nomad
I got the impression it was like a smaller, more opinionated k8s. Like a mix between Docker Swarm and k8s.
It's rare that I see it mentioned though, so I'm not sure how big the community is.