KU041: Running Kubernetes On Nomad

In this episode, Michael, Kristina, and Adriana Villela discuss the challenges and benefits of running Kubernetes on Nomad. Adriana shares her experience of using Nomad in a data center, highlighting its simplicity and ease of deployment compared to Kubernetes. The speakers also discuss the differences between the two platforms, the concept of vendor lock-in, and the future of Kubernetes. Adriana also shares her work on converting various tools from Kubernetes to Nomad, and her upcoming O’Reilly video course on observability with OpenTelemetry. Show Links: Adriana Villela on GitHub Nomad Conversions – GitHub Adri Villela – Adri’s Blog Adri on Mastodon Transcript: This episode was transcribed by AI and lightly formatted. We make these transcripts available to help with content accessibility and searchability but we can’t guarantee accuracy. There are likely to be errors and inaccuracies in the transcription. Michael Levan (00:00:01) – Hello, everybody. Welcome to the Kubernetes Unpacked podcast. My name is Michael Levin. Kristina Devochko (00:00:05) – My name is Cristina. Michael Levan (00:00:07) – And today we have Adriana Vela on. And we are going to be talking about something that I haven’t done yet, which is going to be awesome. Nomad on Kubernetes. How does this whole thing work? I mean, you know, of course we’re going to be diving super in depth in this podcast episode, but Nomad on Kubernetes, I mean, I think technically it makes sense to me, but I’m curious to hear your thoughts, you know, at the high level. And then we can definitely dive into it. **Adriana Villela ** (00:00:32) – Yeah, sure. So just one correction. It’s the other way around. It’s Kubernetes on Nomad. Michael Levan (00:00:36) – Kubernetes on Nomad. I’m sorry. **Adriana Villela ** (00:00:38) – No worries. Honestly, the reason why I tried it out is because I thought why the hell not? For no other reason than that. You know, there’s like Kelsey Hightower’s tutorial of like running Nomad on Kubernetes. And I thought, huh, that’s cool. **Adriana Villela ** (00:00:54) – What if you could do it the other way around, right. For funsies. And when I was playing around with that concept, I was originally going to try to like run V cluster on on Nomad because I thought, well, you know, there’s like helm charts for that and seems pretty straightforward. But then I’m like, that’s a lot of work. Maybe let’s like try to pare it down a bit and see if I can find a Kubernetes distro that’s like super lightweight, maybe something that can exist in a Docker container that I can just deploy on Nomad and away we go. So after some poking around, I found K, which I’d never worked with before. I’d done some work with kind, but not K zeros. And the nice thing about k zeros is you can just run it off of a Docker image. So I thought foolishly, hey, that should be pretty easy. But no, turned out to be not quite so straightforward because it turns out that I went ahead and decided, well, I’ll just like, you know, pop this in a nomad jobs back and get this running in Nomad. **Adriana Villela ** (00:01:59) – No problem. And I got it up and running and then realized that, like, even though the job deployed correctly, Kubernetes was nowhere to be seen, right? Yeah, it just refused to launch the kubelet,