When comparing Rancher vs Nomad, the Slant community recommends Nomad for most people. In the question“What are the best Docker orchestration tools?” Nomad is ranked 3rd while Rancher is ranked 5th. 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.
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Web GUI cluster management
Intuitive and easy to use web gui.
Pro Mult-environment cluster system
- Cattle (Rancher default)
- Swarm
- Kubernetes
- Mesos
Pro Service catalog is easy
Rancher provides a catalog of application templates that make it easy to deploy complex stacks.
- Rancher certified catalog
- Community service catalog
Pro Self-service application stack for self-monitoring
Great contributions from the co community who build the service stack catalog.
One of them is the "Prometheus" template which deploys a collection of containers for monitoring a platform. It's capable of querying all aspects of your environment with some nice pre-built dashboards.
Pro Access control polices
Detailed role-based access control policies can be defined independently for each cluster.
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 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.
