Packer VS Nomad

Compare Packer vs Nomad and see what are their differences.

Packer

Packer is a tool for creating identical machine images for multiple platforms from a single source configuration. (by hashicorp)

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)
InfluxDB - Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale
Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.
www.influxdata.com
featured
SaaSHub - Software Alternatives and Reviews
SaaSHub helps you find the best software and product alternatives
www.saashub.com
featured
Packer Nomad
66 95
14,915 14,450
0.4% 0.7%
9.4 9.9
3 days ago 3 days ago
Go Go
GNU General Public License v3.0 or later 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.

Packer

Posts with mentions or reviews of Packer. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-04-29.
  • AWS Cloud Platform for highly loaded WordPress website
    3 projects | dev.to | 29 Apr 2024
    The missing piece of puzzle is the AMI "golden image" that will be used to start the instances in autoscaling group. The AMI has to have NGINX and PHP installed with the list of required modules enabled. The great tool to brew one is hashicorp packer.
  • The 2024 Web Hosting Report
    37 projects | dev.to | 20 Feb 2024
    To manage a VM, you can use something as simple as just manual actions over SSH, or can use tools like Ansible, Hashicorp's Packer and Terraform or other automations. For an app where there is minimal load and security/reliability concern, VMs are still a great option that provide a lot of value for the buck
  • Avoiding DevOps tool hell
    9 projects | dev.to | 24 Jul 2023
    Server templating: Using Packer has never been easier to create reusable server configurations in a platform-independent and documented manner.
  • How to create an iso image of a finished system
    1 project | /r/linux4noobs | 19 Jun 2023
    I'll give you hard, but rewarding and easy to modify(once you know what you're doing) way. Packer may be a thing you're looking for.
  • 13.2 ZFS root AMIs in AWS
    1 project | /r/freebsd | 17 May 2023
    It is straightforward to build them with packer (I have built AMIs for 13.0 and 13.1, but 13.2 should be exactly the same). I've been meaning to write a blog post about it for a while, but have not gotten to it yet... In any case, what I am doing is using the EBS Surrogate Builder to start an instance running the official FreeBSD 13.2 image with an extra volume attached and run a script to create a zpool on the extra volume and bootstrap and configure FreeBSD 13.2-RELEASE on it. After that packer takes care of creating an AMI out of that extra volume, so you can use it... If you have any issues, let me know, and maybe I will finally get to writing that blog post...
  • DevOps Tooling Landscape
    12 projects | dev.to | 4 Apr 2023
    HashiCorp Packer is a tool for creating machine images for a variety of platforms, including AWS, Azure, and VMware. It allows you to define machine images as code and supports a wide range of configuration options.
  • auto-provisioning multiple raspberry pi's
    2 projects | /r/selfhosted | 19 Mar 2023
    Packer is a tool that can be used to build machine images. Basically, it takes a base image, runs a series of steps to provision that image, and then burns a new image. In my workplace we use it heavily to build AWS AMIs. But it has an ARM plugin that looks to be very very suitable for building customised Raspberry Pi images (my quick read of the doco there says it can go ahead and write the final image to an SD card for you too).
  • How do hosting companies immediately create vm right after purchasing one?
    2 projects | /r/linux | 5 Mar 2023
  • Packer preseed file seems to not be read
    1 project | /r/hashicorp | 18 Feb 2023
    Seems related to https://github.com/hashicorp/packer/issues/12118 But the workaround discribed in the comments doesn’t seems to work anymore
  • How to create AMI which also copies the user data?
    1 project | /r/aws | 5 Jan 2023
    I'd suggest using a tool like Packer to build a gold image based on your base AMI and all your changes. Then you'll have your own AMI you can launch new instances with.

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 2024-05-02.
  • Ask HN: Are there any open source forks of nomad smd consul?
    9 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 2 May 2024
    Doesn't look like it.

    * https://github.com/hashicorp/nomad/forks

    * https://github.com/search?q=nomad%20fork&type=repositories

    * https://www.google.com/search?q=hashicorp+nomad+forks

    There are products that do similar things of course.

  • 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

What are some alternatives?

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

Vagrant - Vagrant is a tool for building and distributing development environments.

k3s - Lightweight Kubernetes

helm - The Kubernetes Package Manager

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

oVirt - oVirt website

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

cloud-init-vmware-guestinfo - A cloud-init datasource for VMware vSphere's GuestInfo interface

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

kubernetes - Production-Grade Container Scheduling and Management

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

QEMU - Official QEMU mirror. Please see https://www.qemu.org/contribute/ for how to submit changes to QEMU. Pull Requests are ignored. Please only use release tarballs from the QEMU website.

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