A few years ago I started using Nomad in my homelab. I've always liked Nomad, a lot. The simplicity of bootstrapping a cluster, the integrations with the entire Hashicorp suite, the ease of deploying new applications, ... But things have changed.

What has changed

Bootstrapping

In the introduction, I put forward the easy provisioning of a cluster. This was certainly an appealing feature of Nomad. Back in the day, bootstrapping a Kubernetes was very hard, but with tools like k3s or k0s, this is no longer true. They package Kubernetes in a single binary, just like Nomad is packaged as a single binary.

Licensing

I'm a big open source enthusiast. Unfortunately, HashiCorp applied a non-open source license to their products. While this license certainly permits me to use their products in a homelab environment, it doesn't feel right and is just another trigger to leave Nomad, Consul, Vault and Terraform behind.

My current work

I work for Inuits, an open source company in Belgium. At the time I started my current homelab, we were also starting our journey of using Nomad within the company. It only made sense to also use it at home.

However, at my current consulting assignment, I'm only using Kubernetes. My expertise lies in Kubernetes. Using Nomad at home and Kubernetes at work, makes me have to know two orchestrators. It's fun to know many tools, but one only has 24 hours in a day. While I love working on my homelab, there's also a life next to the computer, with a wife and 2 children.

The community

The community around the Kubernetes project is so much bigger than the community around Nomad. When you want to do something on Nomad, you almost always have to start from scratch. There's no Prometheus Operator, there's no community creating packages in the form of Helm charts. I know there's Nomad Pack, but it's nowhere near to what Helm is.

Conclusion

All of these reasons led me to rethinking my Homelab. Using Kubernetes would allow me to use my knowledge from work, would give me access to a plethora of community resources and would allow me to keep using open source only software in my homelab.

Now the real works starts, migrating a homelab that's production in some regards. There's a PhotoPrism deployment, storing all of our family photos, there's a Radicale calendar that we use to organize our lives, a Vikunja installation to manage our to do lists, among many other applications that are used on a daily basis.

Let's get on with it!