Been using Nomad and different sorts of K8S for the last 6+ years at home/work. Nomad is easier to bootstrap, lighter on resources and so so so much easier wrap your head around. Just Nomad + NFS server, from my perspective, is a perfect start for a homelab/small project. You can add complexity to it as you go. It is a real joy work with once you after a day of tinkering. Want to run on windows? Sure. BSD, there is a driver for it. Don't want Docker? There is Podman driver. OCI sucks? Just run binaries without isolation. Need VM's? You can switch from Proxmox to purely Nomad setup with Qemu driver with a bit of sweat. Illumos zones on OmniOS? weird, but with quite a bit of time, but there was a repo on github, just need to build the binary with the patch.
And while k8s can do all the same things and much more with a bit of trying, but it requires a mission control the second you add a second developer, you will have built-in primitives that will compete all the time with the ones you bolt-on, etc etc. Nomad feels much more opinionated and in a good way.
Nomad is one of those things that gets you 90% of the way with 20% of effort, and only then if you need something, you can add things to it. K8S is great, way more flexible, there are managed options out there, massive ecosystem, but it always feels like out of the box you need to glue 5 different tools to it, just get it going.
Also Incus. Stephane Graeber is doing lords work by sticking to his thing. That's also super fun to mess with.
In my experience Nomad is a much better system. People avoid it because they fear vendor lock-in, but the fact that Hashicorp controls it also means that it is well-designed and interoperates easily with other Hashicorp tools.
And while k8s can do all the same things and much more with a bit of trying, but it requires a mission control the second you add a second developer, you will have built-in primitives that will compete all the time with the ones you bolt-on, etc etc. Nomad feels much more opinionated and in a good way.
Nomad is one of those things that gets you 90% of the way with 20% of effort, and only then if you need something, you can add things to it. K8S is great, way more flexible, there are managed options out there, massive ecosystem, but it always feels like out of the box you need to glue 5 different tools to it, just get it going.
Also Incus. Stephane Graeber is doing lords work by sticking to his thing. That's also super fun to mess with.