When comparing Amazon EC2 Container Service vs Nomad, the Slant community recommends Nomad for most people. In the question“What are the best cluster managers?” Nomad is ranked 2nd while Amazon EC2 Container Service is ranked 4th. The most important reason people chose Nomad is:
Being focused on one thing only also has its advantages. For one, Nomad is very simple architecturally. There's only a single binary for both clients and servers, it also does not need any external services for any coordination or storage.
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Pros
Pro Separates scheduling logic from state management
One of the core principles on which ECS is built is the separation of scheduling logic from state management. This way, you can choose to use the ECS schedulers, write your own or even integrate third-party schedulers.
Pro Simple, minimal architecture
Being focused on one thing only also has its advantages. For one, Nomad is very simple architecturally. There's only a single binary for both clients and servers, it also does not need any external services for any coordination or storage.
Pro Complex applications can easily be expressed through Nomad
Nomad uses a high-level abstraction of jobs. Jobs are essentially task groups (sets of tasks). Because of this, Nomad allows users to develop and manage complex applications easily, without having to think about the individual containers that make these applications.
Pro Easy to reason about
Nomad gives a lot of output and is intentionally kept simple. This makes maintenance easy and reduces downtimes.
Pro Big comapnies, like eBay and CircleCI use it
Cons
Con You have to manually prescale a cluster
Initially you have to create the EC2 instances that you wish to put in your ECS cluster, using the AMI so that they have the ECS agent on them. However, you have to prescale that specific cluster manually after that.
Con Only provides cluster management and scheduling
While other orchestration tools provide much more than just cluster management and scheduling (they also provide things like secrets management, discovery, monitoring, etc.), Nomad follows the Unix philosophy of doing only one thing and doing it well, providing only cluster management and scheduling.