Selfhosted

Good question! So it depends, but TLDR: imo it's worth it, or it's fine, but it's easy to try yourself and see

most services in their docs will show how to deploy with kubernetes or docker, but rarely Nomad

You are absolutely correct, but I do find that for the large large majority of things, either you can find an online Nomad config, or the Nomad config is easy enough to translate from Docker compose. Only some complicated larger deployments (think Immich) are harder to translate, but even then it just takes some trial and error. I really do think that extra trouble of translating is very much worth the pain you save yourself in terms of deploying k8s though. You might spend a bit longer typing out the Nomad job file yourself, but in exchange you are thankfully not maintaining the k8s cluster.

As far Nomad-specific documentation goes, I think it the official one is more than good enough.

You mentioned compatibility. So far I have not found anything I really wanted that was not possible to set up in Nomad. Nomad does CNI and CSI, which is the same API k8s uses, so thinkgs working there will work for Nomad. Other things you would use with docker compose or k8s don't work with Nomad, but you don't need them (for example: portainer or metrics exporters) because Nomad has them natively already (this blog discusses that).

As you can see I am pretty opinionated towards Nomad - I have been using it in my previous job in prod, and in my home-lab for a year now, and I am very happy with it. If you would like to read more I recommend this blog post. For Nomad on NixOS I wrote this one.

For now my advice is: just try nomad yourself (as simple as running nomad agent -dev on your laptop), run the tutorial, and see if it was easy enough that you see yourself using it for the rest of your containers. If you need more help you are welcome to DM me :)

I struggled a bit to get it up and running well, but now I am happy with it. It's not too hard to deploy (at least easier than the alternatives), it has CSI which for me was big, and it has erasure coding. The dev that maintains it (yes, the one dev) is very responsive.

It has trade offs, so depending on your needs, I recommend it. Backing store for stateful workloads like postgres DBs? Absolutely not. Large S3 store (with an option for filesystem mount) for storing lots of files? Yes! In that regard it's good for stuff like Lemmy's pictrs or immich. I use it as my own Google drive. You can easily replicate in your own cluster, or back it up to an external cloud provider. You can mount it via FUSE on your personal machine too.

Feel free to browse through my setup - if you have specific questions I am happy to answer them.

I recommend starting with ZeroToNix's docs and then moving on to nixos.wiki, but here is a minimal, working example that I could deploy to a hetzner VPS that only has nix and ssh installed:

{ config, pkgs, ... }: {
  # generated, this will set up partitions and bootloader in a separate file
  imports = [ ./hardware-configuration.nix ];
  zramSwap.enable = true;
  networking.hostName = "miki";
  # configures SSH daemon with a public key so we can ssh in again
  services.openssh.enable = true;
  users.users.root.openssh.authorizedKeys.keys = [ ''ssh-ed25519 AAAAC3NzaC1lNDI1NTE5AAAAIPJ7FM3wEuWoVuxRkWnh9PNEtG+HOcwcZIt6Qg/Y1jka'' ];
  # creates a timmy user with sudo access and wget installed
  users.users.timmy = {
    isNormalUser = true;
    extraGroups = [ "networkmanager" "wheel" "sudo" ];
    packages = with pkgs; [ wget ];
  };
  # open up SSH port
  networking.firewall.allowedTCPPorts = [ 22 ];
  # start nginx, assumes HTML is present at `/var/www`
  services.nginx = {
    enable = true;
    virtualHosts."default" = {
      forceSSL = true;            # Redirect HTTP clients to an HTTPs connection
      default = true;             # Always use this host, no matter the host name
      root = /var/www;        # Set the web root to ser
    };
  };
  system.stateVersion = "22.11";
}

This sets up a machine, configures the usual stuff like the ssh daemon, creates a user, and sets up an nginx server. To deploy it you would run nixos-rebuild --target-host [email protected] switch. Other tools exist (I use colmena but the idea is the same). Note how easy it was to set up nginx! If I was setting Nomad up, I would just do services.nomad.enable = true.

As you can see some things you will have to learn (the nix language, what the configs are...) but I think it is worth it.