K8s vs Nomad vs Bacalhau: Choosing Your Compute Orchestrator Wisely
Why Bacalhau can be the missing piece for your infrastructure.
Are you wrestling with massive datasets scattered everywhere? Well, then you know that moving petabytes of data to a central cluster is slow, costly, and risky. While Kubernetes and Nomad are powerful orchestrators, they assume you'll bring data to the compute.
But what if that's your bottleneck? Bacalhau offers a different path: bring compute to the data.
Let’s see the differences!
Comparing Kubernetes, Nomad, and Bacalhau: Key Differences
Let's break down the key differences between these three.
What They Run
Kubernetes: Is the king of containers (Docker and more) with a huge ecosystem around them. WASM support is growing, but containers are its core strength.
Nomad: More flexible than k8s. Natively handles containerized and non-containerized apps. Great for mixed legacy and modern workloads.
Bacalhau: Natively runs Docker & WASM. Its pluggable architecture allows custom binaries too. Built to run compute where data lives, including leveraging specific hardware like GPUs.
Architecture & Footprint
Kubernetes: Powerful but complex control plane. Best suited for relatively homogenous clusters, usually in one data center/cloud.
Nomad: Lightweight (single binary). Simpler setup than K8s, good for managing diverse architectures within a cluster.
Bacalhau: Designed for distributed environments. Lightweight agent runs anywhere, focusing on executing jobs across varied nodes, not managing the infrastructure itself.
How They Handle Jobs
Kubernetes: Manages long-running services and batch jobs (
Jobs/CronJobs). However, often needs to rely on frameworks like Spark or Flink for complex distributed data processing.Nomad: Supports service, batch, and system jobs. Handles various task types efficiently.
Bacalhau: Optimized for "embarrassingly parallel" tasks common in data processing. Offers batch, service, ops, and daemon job types, giving flexibility for different distributed compute needs.
Dealing With Queues & Disconnection:
Kubernetes: Supports scheduling and queuing. Not natively designed for environments with frequent disconnections (like the edge).
Nomad: Handles job queues well. Clients can tolerate temporary network disconnects.
Bacalhau: Built for disconnected or intermittently connected environments (like the edge). Features explicit job queuing and can wait for nodes to reconnect.
Security Approach
Kubernetes & Nomad: Robust security features (RBAC, ACLs). However, the centralized model (moving data or needing broad access) increases risks like metadata leakage.
Bacalhau: Security advantage via "Compute Over Data". Minimizing data movement inherently reduces exposure. Less centralized metadata lowers breach impact.
When to Choose Which
So, how do you choose one or another for your application? Let’s break down the big ideas:
Kubernetes: Best for complex, containerized microservices needing rich networking and auto-scaling, primarily in a central location.
Nomad: Ideal for simpler orchestration of mixed workloads in one place, or when K8s feels too heavy.
Bacalhau: Your go-to if:
Processing large, distributed datasets is the main goal.
Data gravity (cost/time of moving data) is high.
Data sovereignty/privacy rules prevent moving data.
You need robust edge computing capabilities.
The Bottom Line
No solution suits all needs. You need to choose the orchestrator that fits your particular case.
K8s and Nomad excel at managing applications where compute and data are centralized. Bacalhau, on the other hand, shines when your data is spread out, tackling the challenges of data gravity and distribution head-on by bringing the compute to where your data already lives.
Want to know better how to make the right choice when searching for the right orchestrator? Read the complete article on our website!
What's Next?
To start using Bacalhau, install Bacalhau and give it a shot.
However, if you don’t have a network and you would still like to try it out, we recommend using Expanso Cloud. Also, if you would like to set up a cluster on your own, you can do that too (we have setup guides for AWS, GCP, Azure, and many more 🙂).
Get Involved!
We welcome your involvement in Bacalhau. There are many ways to contribute, and we’d love to hear from you. Please reach out to us at any of the following locations:
Commercial Support
While Bacalhau is open-source software, the Bacalhau binaries go through the security, verification, and signing build process lovingly crafted by Expanso. You can read more about the difference between open-source Bacalhau and commercially supported Bacalhau in our FAQ. If you would like to use our pre-built binaries and receive commercial support, please contact us or get your license on Expanso Cloud!