swarmkit VS Nomad

Compare swarmkit vs Nomad and see what are their differences.

swarmkit

A toolkit for orchestrating distributed systems at any scale. It includes primitives for node discovery, raft-based consensus, task scheduling and more. (by moby)

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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swarmkit Nomad
14 94
3,241 14,398
1.2% 0.8%
8.2 9.9
8 days ago 5 days ago
Go Go
Apache License 2.0 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.

swarmkit

Posts with mentions or reviews of swarmkit. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-05-26.
  • Questions about Swarm mode
    1 project | /r/docker | 26 Jun 2023
    It's supported, though the development pace is rather slow. The are new features (the latest release brought support for the Container Storage Interface) and bugs and issues are worked on by the few maintainers the project has. You can check the repo here: https://github.com/moby/swarmkit
  • K8s vs Docker Swarm
    2 projects | /r/homelab | 26 May 2023
    So the thing is support for Swarm was delegated to Mirantis, https://www.mirantis.com/blog/mirantis-will-continue-to-support-and-develop-docker-swarm/ since it was delegated very little was done to move forward swarm _> https://github.com/moby/swarmkit/commits/master , docker swarm itself (docker the company) is deprecated https://github.com/docker-archive/classicswarm . I think because there's no way to monetize swarm there's no real push for new features hence my assumption of deprecation.
  • Feature request: Enable "--device" in "stack deploy" for Confidential Computing
    1 project | /r/DockerSwarm | 17 Apr 2023
    Feature request: Enable "--device" in "stack deploy" for Confidential Computing
  • Swarmlet: A self-hosted, open-source Platform as a Service
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 15 Feb 2023
    This doesn't look that abandoned? https://github.com/moby/swarmkit

    Or are you talking about swarm the product (versus docker swarm mode)

  • Docker 23.0.0 is out
    4 projects | /r/docker | 2 Feb 2023
    I don’t feel a momentum in Docker Swarm development, seeing pull requests like #3072 sitting idle for half a year, originally from 2016.
  • Looking to containerize a large production scale nodejs app
    3 projects | /r/docker | 26 Jan 2023
    privileged not being supported is problematic, but there are PRs for it on swarmkit, see https://github.com/moby/swarmkit/pull/3072 - let's see if that gets in.
  • high availability
    1 project | /r/docker | 12 Oct 2022
    swarm ha placement
  • Is docker still the solution for On-Premesis containerization?
    3 projects | /r/docker | 27 Sep 2022
    It is already in a different repo: moby/swarmkit
  • Help convincing IT/IS department to use Kubernetes
    1 project | /r/kubernetes | 20 Oct 2021
    Docker Swarm is dead. It should not be used for new projects because the competitive products are much better and more optimal. Check their repo bro - last commit 3months ago. https://github.com/docker/swarmkit https://www.reddit.com/r/docker/comments/ituysl/why_people_are_saying_docker_swarm_is_in_life/ Why would you start a project with a tool which got no future? Let's then use Silverlight or any shit like that.
  • Why docker swarm is not popular as Kubernetes?
    16 projects | /r/docker | 30 Jul 2021
    Mostly it just needs resource defaults merged and some abstract type support so load balancer config doesn't have to be entirely by labels and I would never shift from it.

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 swarmkit and Nomad you can also consider the following projects:

roadmap - Welcome to the Public Roadmap for All Things Docker! We welcome your ideas.

k3s - Lightweight Kubernetes

docker - Moby Project - a collaborative project for the container ecosystem to assemble container-based systems [Moved to: https://github.com/moby/moby]

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

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

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

kubespray - Deploy a Production Ready Kubernetes Cluster

distribution-spec - OCI Distribution Specification

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

kops - Kubernetes Operations (kOps) - Production Grade k8s Installation, Upgrades and Management

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