bytes.zone

shopping for a scheduler

Brian Hicks, February 7, 2024

The first thing on my "meta" list is to get my house in order with how I deploy things. Right now I have a single VM in DigitalOcean that runs my blog, git.bytes.zone, and a couple other smaller static sites. (See clown computing.)

That's starting to kind of burst at the seams, though. I haven't done an amazing job separating databases for various things, so they all live in one big server and backup. I also can't publish a blog post without rebuilding the entire VM in Nix. That means that yesterday, for example, I was trying to publish a blog post and Nix (via nixbuild.net) was trying to recompile the Linux kernel. Those are both important things, but they need to be done separately. It's all too messy and needs a good scrub.

I'd like to move things into containers (or at least separate them a bit more) and I think I have two great options: Kubernetes and HashiCorp's Nomad. I've used or consulted on deployments of both, but it's been a while so I'm trying to brush up. Here's what I'm trying to evaluate:

In short: it's hard to decide. Both options have things to recommend them as well as clear tradeoffs (the biggest one being operational simplicity trading off for ecosystem support.) It's also the case that either option would be fine, and once all the stuff I want is containerized moving between them is not too bad (my workloads are simple enough that ingress is going to be the pain point rather than overlay networking or service discovery.)

After publishing my last post, I actually got in contact with a couple folks who have used both of these in bigger ways than I have to see what they think. I'm curious to hear what they have to say!

If you'd like me to email you when I have a new post, sign up below and I'll do exactly that!

If you just have questions about this, or anything I write, please feel free to email me!