> If running Nomad at scale is anything like Vault, then it isn't as simple as people make it out to be, never mind the fact that you'll probably be running 5 different clusters of 3 different products to provide functionality that doesn't fulfill half of what Kubernetes gives.
The complexity of setting up a Nomad cluster due to Vault and Consul being soft requirements is very real and something we're hoping to (finally!) make progress on in the coming months.
you would need to make it as simple as running k3s on 1,3,5 nodes and probably also have stuff like system-upgrade-manager and another good idea is to work on flatcar linux, etc.
k3s is so good for small-middle sized metal clusters and also works on a single node. it's so simple to start, you will have a rough time to actually try to gain momentum in this space which will also not generate a lot of revenue.
the only thing which is not so easy is LoadBalancing to extern i.e. kube-vip/metallb both can be a pain (externalTrafficPolicy: Local is still a shit show).
k3s basically creates a k8s cluster with everything except good load balancing over multiple nodes
A single Nomad process can be the server (scheduler) and client (worker). Nomad can run in single server mode if highly available scheduling is not a concern (workloads will not be interrupted if your server does go down) by setting bootstrap_expect=1 (instead of 3, 5, 7, etc). You can always add more servers later to make a non-HA cluster HA. No need to use different projects to setup different clusters. Clients can be added or removed at any time with no configuration changes (people using Nomad in the cloud generally put servers in 1 ASG and clients in another ASG).
Nomad does not have a first class LoadBalancing concept in keeping with its unopinionated network model, although we may add ingress/loadbalancing someday. Right now most people use Traefik or Nginx with Consul for ingress, and Consul Connect is popular for internal service mesh. Obviously unfortunate extra complexity over having it builtin, but Nomad has been focused more on core scheduling than these ancillary services so far.
The complexity of setting up a Nomad cluster due to Vault and Consul being soft requirements is very real and something we're hoping to (finally!) make progress on in the coming months.