Maybe You Don't Need Kubernetes

A woman riding a scooter

Source: Illustration created by freepik, Nomad logo by HashiCorp.

Kubernetes is the 800-pound gorilla of container orchestration.

It powers some of the biggest deployments worldwide, but it comes with a price tag.

Especially for smaller teams, it can be time-consuming to maintain and has a steep learning curve. For what our team of four wanted to achieve at trivago, it added too much overhead. So we looked into alternatives — and fell in love with Nomad.

The wishlist

Our team runs a number of typical services for monitoring and performance analysis: API endpoints for metrics written in Go, Prometheus exporters, log parsers like Logstash or Gollum, and databases like InfluxDB or Elasticsearch. Each of these services run in their own container. We needed a simple system to keep those jobs running.

We started with a list of requirements for container orchestration:

Run a fleet of services across many machines.

Provide an overview of running services.

Allow for communication between services.

Restart them automatically when they die.

Be manageable by a small team.

On top of that, the following things were nice to have but not strictly required:

Tag machines by their capabilities (e.g., label machines with fast disks for I/O heavy services.)

Be able to run these services independently of any orchestrator (e.g. in development).

Have a common place to share configurations and secrets.

Provide an endpoint for metrics and logging.

Why Kubernetes was not a good fit for us

When creating a prototype with Kubernetes, we noticed that we started adding ever-more complex layers of logic to operate our services. Logic on which we implicitly relied on.

As an example, Kubernetes allows embedding service configurations using ConfigMaps. Especially when merging multiple config files or adding more services to a pod, this can get quite confusing quickly. Kubernetes - or helm, for that matter - allows injecting external configs dynamically to ensure separation of concerns. But this can lead to tight, implicit coupling between your project and Kubernetes. Helm and ConfigMaps are optional features so you don’t have to use them. You might as well just copy the config into the Docker image. However, it’s tempting to go down that path and build unnecessary abstractions that can later bite you.

On top of that, the Kubernetes ecosystem is still rapidly evolving. It takes a fair amount of time and energy to stay up-to-date with the best practices and latest tooling. Kubectl, minikube, kubeadm, helm, tiller, kops, oc - the list goes on and on. Not all tools are necessary to get started with Kubernetes, but it’s hard to know which ones are, so you have to be at least aware of them. Because of that, the learning curve is quite steep.

When to use Kubernetes

At trivago specifically, many teams use Kubernetes and are quite happy with it. These instances are managed by Google or Amazon however, which have the capacity to do so.

Kubernetes comes with amazing features, that make container orchestration at scale more manageable:

Fine-grained rights management

Custom controllers allow getting logic into the cluster. These are just programs that talk to the Kubernetes API.

Autoscaling! Kubernetes can scale your services up and down on demand. It uses service metrics to do this without manual intervention.

The question is if you really need all those features. You can't rely on these abstractions to just work; you'll have to learn what's going on under the hood.

Especially in our team, which runs most services on-premise (because of its close connection to trivago's core infrastructure), we didn't want to afford running our own Kubernetes cluster. We wanted to ship services instead.

Batteries not included

Nomad is the 20% of service orchestration that gets you 80% of the way. All it does is manage deployments. It takes care of your rollouts and restarts your containers in case of errors, and that's about it.

The entire point of Nomad is that it does less: it doesn’t include fine-grained rights management or advanced network policies, and that’s by design. Those components are provided as enterprise services, by a third-party, or not at all.

I think Nomad hit a sweet-spot between ease of use and expressiveness. It's good for small, mostly independent services. If you need more control, you'll have to build it yourself or use a different approach. Nomad is just an orchestrator.

The best part about Nomad is that it's easy to replace. There is little to no vendor lock-in because the functionality it provides can easily be integrated into any other system that manages services. It just runs as a plain old single binary on every machine in your cluster; that's it!

The Nomad ecosystem of loosely coupled components

The real power of Nomad lies within its ecosystem. It integrates very well with other - completely optional - products like Consul (a key-value store) or Vault (for secrets handling). Inside your Nomad file, you can have sections for fetching data from those services:

template { data = <<EOH LOG_LEVEL= "{{key " service/geo-api/log-verbosity "}}" API_KEY= "{{with secret " secret/geo-api-key "}}{{.Data.value}}{{end}}" EOH destination = "secrets/file.env" env = true }

This will read the service/geo-api/log-verbosity key from Consul and expose it as a LOG_LEVEL environment variable inside your job. It's also exposing secret/geo-api-key from Vault as API_KEY . Simple, but powerful!

Because it's so simple, Nomad can also be easily extended with other services through its API. For example, jobs can be tagged for service discovery. At trivago, we tag all services, which expose metrics, with trv-metrics . This way, Prometheus finds the services via Consul and periodically scrapes the /metrics endpoint for new data. The same can be done for logs by integrating Loki for example.

There are many other examples for extensibility:

Trigger a Jenkins job using a webhook and Consul watches to redeploy your Nomad job on service config changes.

Use Ceph to add a distributed file system to Nomad.

Use fabio for load balancing.

All of this allowed us to grow our infrastructure organically without too much up-front commitment.

Fair warning

No system is perfect. I advise you not to use any fancy new features in production right now. There are bugs and missing features of course - but that's also the case for Kubernetes.

Compared to Kubernetes, there is far less momentum behind Nomad. Kubernetes has seen around 75.000 commits and 2000 contributors so far, while Nomad sports about 14.000 commits and 300 contributors. It will be hard for Nomad to keep up with the velocity of Kubernetes, but maybe it doesn’t have to! The scope is much more narrow and the smaller community could also mean that it'll be easier to get your pull request accepted, in comparison to Kubernetes.

Summary

The takeaway is: don't use Kubernetes just because everybody else does. Carefully evaluate your requirements and check which tool fits the bill.

If you're planning to deploy a fleet of homogenous services on large-scale infrastructure, Kubernetes might be the way to go. Just be aware of the additional complexity and operational costs. Some of these costs can be avoided by using a managed Kubernetes environment like Google Kubernetes Engine or Amazon EKS.

If you're just looking for a reliable orchestrator that is easy to maintain and extendable, why not give Nomad a try? You might be surprised by how far it'll get you.

If Kubernetes were a car, Nomad would be a scooter. Sometimes you prefer one and sometimes the other. Both have their right to exist.