lxd VS Nomad

Compare lxd vs Nomad and see what are their differences.

lxd

Powerful system container and virtual machine manager (by canonical)

Nomad

Nomad is an easy-to-use, flexible, and performant workload orchestrator that can deploy a mix of microservice, batch, containerized, and non-containerized applications. Nomad is easy to operate and scale and has native Consul and Vault integrations. (by hashicorp)
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lxd Nomad
6 94
4,222 14,422
0.9% 0.9%
10.0 9.9
7 days ago 5 days ago
Go Go
GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 GNU General Public License v3.0 or later
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

lxd

Posts with mentions or reviews of lxd. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-07-06.
  • Canonical re-licenses LXD under AGPLv3, slaps a CLA on top
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 12 Dec 2023
    Please correct me if I'm wrong, but the post also links the "add Canonical CLA check #12665" [0], and my understanding is that "retain copyright" here is like a typical forum agreement where you going forward must agree to a perpetual worldwide unlimited license to Canonical that they can use as they please per [1]:

    >In effect, you’re giving us a licence, but you still own the copyright — so you retain the right to modify your code and use it in other projects.

    You explicitly do retain ownership, so you can then take that same code and contribute it elsewhere under any license you wish. The same author could contribute the same patch to both the LXD and the Incus fork. But some might object to being required to allow Canonical to specially license as they want.

    So your characterization seems unfair, and then gets kind of nasty at the end:

    >The author is pissed off because he can't build custom versions without redistributing the modifications

    Incus is a full fork, and Canonical has apparently been taking changes back from it as well as is often the case with such forks where both sides get value from each other. It's perfectly understandable for some folks to be bummed if that's no longer the case, and there is nothing evil about the Apache2 license. There's plenty of history that in OSS going back to the beginning, no need for insinuations or attacks.

    ----

    0: https://github.com/canonical/lxd/pull/12665/commits/eb5c773d...

    1: https://ubuntu.com/legal/contributors

  • Vm and hypervisor
    1 project | /r/homelab | 10 Dec 2023
    You could consider LXD which lets you easily run both containers and VMs: https://ubuntu.com/lxd
  • LXD Moves into Canonical
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 6 Jul 2023
    I hope this doesn't affect LXC negatively.

    LXC and LXD share plenty of contributors.

    https://github.com/lxc/lxc/graphs/contributors

    https://github.com/canonical/lxd/graphs/contributors

    I use an "unprivileged LXC container" setup on several Debian bullseye hosts. It works fantastic, and each LXC container feels like a real server.

    Compare that to Docker's "one-container-one-process" philosophy, reinventing the wheel by awkwardly composing multiple containers.

  • LXD Has been moved to Canonical
    1 project | /r/LXD | 6 Jul 2023
    [1] https://linuxcontainers.org/lxd/
    1 project | /r/opensource | 5 Jul 2023
  • LXD is now under Canonical
    3 projects | /r/LXD | 4 Jul 2023
    The expected changes are: - https://github.com/lxc/lxd will now become https://github.com/canonical/lxd - https://linuxcontainers.org/lxd will disappear and be replaced with a mention directing users to https://ubuntu.com/lxd - The LXD YouTube channel will be handed over to the Canonical team - The LXD section on the LinuxContainers community forum will slowly be sunset in favor of the Ubuntu Discourse forum run by Canonical - The LXD CI infrastructure will be moved under Canonical’s care - Image building for Linux Containers will no longer be relying on systems provided by Canonical, limiting image building to x86_64 and aarch64.

Nomad

Posts with mentions or reviews of Nomad. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-04-23.
  • IBM Planning to Acquire HashiCorp
    5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 23 Apr 2024
    I don't have any further insight, but looking at <https://github.com/hashicorp/nomad/forks?include=active&page...> coughed up https://github.com/atlassian/nomad/branches although confusingly it says "updated last week" but browsing any one of the branches seems to be stupid old so I got nothing

    Finding conceptual forks, e.g. $(git push --mirror ...) would be trickier but I bet sourcegraph could do it

    Ultimately, the question boils down to: what risk are you driving down: hitching your wagon to a dead stack, not getting security updates, not getting PRs merged, $other?

  • Running Docker based web applications in Hashicorp Nomad with Traefik Load balancing
    3 projects | dev.to | 15 Mar 2024
    In previous post, we discussed creating a basic Nomad cluster in the Vultr cloud. Here, we will use the cluster created to deploy a load-balanced sample web app using the service discovery capability of Nomad and its native integration with the Traefik load balancer. The source code is available here for the reference.
  • Building HashiCorp Nomad Cluster in Vultr Cloud using Terraform
    2 projects | dev.to | 11 Mar 2024
    Nomad is really awesome!
  • K0s: Kubernetes distro as a single binary with zero host OS dependencies
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 1 Jan 2024
    I only heard of this today, but it looks really interesting. It seems to finally get Kubernetes a bit closer to something like https://www.nomadproject.io/ in terms of complexity to install and operate.
  • Embracing Simplicity: The Advantages of Nomad over Kubernetes
    2 projects | dev.to | 16 Dec 2023
    In the rapidly evolving landscape of container orchestration and management, two prominent players have emerged: Kubernetes and HashiCorp's Nomad. While Kubernetes has gained widespread adoption and popularity, Nomad provides a compelling alternative that stands out for its simplicity and efficiency. In this blog post, we'll explore the advantages of using Nomad over Kubernetes and why it might be the right choice for certain use cases.
  • HashiCorp Vault Forked into OpenBao
    8 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 8 Dec 2023
    I can't discern how many are just those "dependabot" bumps but the 1400 forks show some are active https://github.com/hashicorp/nomad/forks?include=active&page... including CircleCI who I would think have a stake in a libre Nomad https://github.com/circleci/nomad/tree/circleci/release-1.5....

    Now maybe their goals don't align with the community, and/or they don't want to be in the maintainer business for such a project, but better than nothing

  • Remote execution of code
    4 projects | /r/Python | 5 Dec 2023
    Could this be a solution? nomad
  • Google Kubernetes Engine incident spanning 9 days
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 10 Oct 2023
  • Homebrew deprecate and add caveat for HashiCorp
    7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 8 Oct 2023
    It worth noting that Nomad UI(a official web admin panel) has log tailing utility built-in so maybe partial work has already been done. The developers may have other concerns.

    The related issue is https://github.com/hashicorp/nomad/issues/10220

  • HashiCorp Adopts Business Source License
    25 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 10 Aug 2023
    While I do understand the reasoning in their FAQ on the subject (https://www.hashicorp.com/license-faq). I however failed to noticed those intentions in their license text (https://github.com/hashicorp/nomad/commit/b3e30b1dfa185d9437...).

    Specifically the part in FAQ which says "internal production use is fine", but then license says that "non-production use only" and then "You may make production use of the Licensed Work, provided such use does not include offering the Licensed Work to third parties on a hosted or embedded basis which is competitive with HashiCorp's products.".

    IANAL, but even to me this statement is full loopholes. WHO do we consider 3rd party? WHAT do we consider "hosted or embedded basis"? WHEN do we consider it "competitive with Hashicorps products"?

What are some alternatives?

When comparing lxd and Nomad you can also consider the following projects:

kubevirt - Kubernetes Virtualization API and runtime in order to define and manage virtual machines.

k3s - Lightweight Kubernetes

kata-containers - Kata Containers is an open source project and community working to build a standard implementation of lightweight Virtual Machines (VMs) that feel and perform like containers, but provide the workload isolation and security advantages of VMs. https://katacontainers.io/

Rundeck - Enable Self-Service Operations: Give specific users access to your existing tools, services, and scripts

podman - Podman: A tool for managing OCI containers and pods.

Dkron - Dkron - Distributed, fault tolerant job scheduling system https://dkron.io

firecracker-container

Docker Compose - Define and run multi-container applications with Docker

firecracker-containerd - firecracker-containerd enables containerd to manage containers as Firecracker microVMs

dapr - Dapr is a portable, event-driven, runtime for building distributed applications across cloud and edge.

lxdui - LXDUI is a web UI for the native Linux container technology LXD/LXC