> what is the business value over raw executables + Nomad.
It's not a given than any of the major business value generators are relevant to your shop, your domain, and your business demands. KISS is always good advice.
Low hanging fruit: Nomad (backed by HashiCorp), is a direct competitor to kubernetes (backed by google). One of those solutions is available turn-key on every major cloud provider and also the premiere Enterprise VM management solution. The other is called Nomad ;)
Raw executables pack up very nicely into containers, so if you're able to exist happily with just apps then just apps in containers won't change much (and therefore look like extra work)... For numerous domains raw executables are just a percentage of the deployment. Be it third-party apps/drivers that need to be installed, registry fixes, or whatever the Ops demands for server maintenance are a non-starter. And then things like load balancing and dynamic scaling pop up...
More importantly, for what I do, the binary validation of an immutable server in multiple zones is critical to ensuring security. Nothing can be changed, nothing shall change, and every point of customization will be scripted, or else it can't get near our data.
Cross platform and legacy scenarios are major players. More pressing, though, are the application level primatives that k8s provides in a cross-platform cross-cloud manner (which can also be federated...), so that your scaling story is adequately handled and your local apps become much more robust and cloud-native.
Bottom line: it's not a given that k8s will improve your life, here and now, apps + Nomad is viable. For the broader eco-system though the "other stuff" in k8s, and the rigidity/stability of dependency graphs in containers, are clear value drivers and highly meaningful.
Yeah KISS was very important when I first started working at my current company. I was hired to setup a modern development shop with three database developers who were just learning C#, no source control, no CI/CD, basically no development "process", they ran a lot of things manually.
I was going to be introducing a lot of changes.
Every decision I made was based on keeping things as simple as possible to keep them from getting frustrated. If that weren't the case, I would have gone straight to Docker. Knowing that I might need that flexibility later but didn't want to commit right now, I chose Nomad because I knew it could both handle phase 1 and allow us to move to Docker once appropriate.
But now, that we are in AWS, there is a big push to get to the next level of cloud maturity - not just moving VMs to the cloud, but how to take advantage of a "cloud first" approach and actually take advantage of some of the features that AWS offers.
So in that vein, there is a need for Docker to go "serverless". Lambda is not an option - we have long running processes.
Even when we do go to Docker, we will probably make a transistion from Nomad straight to Amazon's Fargate.
I see a path where we move from .Net 4.6 to .Net Core and Docker with Nomad to Fargate.
The only issue with Fargate for us now is the added complexity that Fargate only supports Linux containers. I don't know how much of a lift that would be. Theoretically it shouldn't be much with a pure .Net Core solution.
You are remarkably well positioned to take advantage of any solution from what you've told.
My group is skipping Kubernetes to go straight to Fargate and we are... not so we'll positioned as you happen to be.
Much to my chagrin, as a newbie to AWS who has loads of homegrown experience with Kubernetes and its predecessors (Fleet, etcd) I am wholly reliant on the AWS solutions engineers we have in-house to help me navigate this thing via CloudFormation and friends, it's too much for one person to figure out in 20 hours during a pilot/assessment study.
I am an application developer who learned Kubernetes in his free time over the past 3 years because it was free. There are thousands of us, with computers in our basements, learning these systems on our own, with no institutional support. Sure, I needed lots of help, but I didn't have to spend money on cloud instances just to learn, or be sure to remember to terminate them when the experiment was over.
By contrast, AWS has only just made Amazon Linux 2 available to run on your own machines less than two months ago. There is still no way to set up ECS or Fargate on our own metal, and probably never will be, because Amazon does not see a reason for it.
Vendor lock-in is real and it has casualties! There are real negative effects that you don't see. If you say "I would not hire someone like you because you have specific skills I won't take advantage of," you have to ask yourself is that because of something that I've done or is it something that Amazon is doing.
It's not a given than any of the major business value generators are relevant to your shop, your domain, and your business demands. KISS is always good advice.
Low hanging fruit: Nomad (backed by HashiCorp), is a direct competitor to kubernetes (backed by google). One of those solutions is available turn-key on every major cloud provider and also the premiere Enterprise VM management solution. The other is called Nomad ;)
Raw executables pack up very nicely into containers, so if you're able to exist happily with just apps then just apps in containers won't change much (and therefore look like extra work)... For numerous domains raw executables are just a percentage of the deployment. Be it third-party apps/drivers that need to be installed, registry fixes, or whatever the Ops demands for server maintenance are a non-starter. And then things like load balancing and dynamic scaling pop up...
More importantly, for what I do, the binary validation of an immutable server in multiple zones is critical to ensuring security. Nothing can be changed, nothing shall change, and every point of customization will be scripted, or else it can't get near our data.
Cross platform and legacy scenarios are major players. More pressing, though, are the application level primatives that k8s provides in a cross-platform cross-cloud manner (which can also be federated...), so that your scaling story is adequately handled and your local apps become much more robust and cloud-native.
Bottom line: it's not a given that k8s will improve your life, here and now, apps + Nomad is viable. For the broader eco-system though the "other stuff" in k8s, and the rigidity/stability of dependency graphs in containers, are clear value drivers and highly meaningful.