Every time I read about Nomad, I wonder the same. I swear I'm not trolling here, I honestly don't get how running Nomad is simpler than Kubernetes. Especially considering that there are substantially more resources and help on Kubernetes than Nomad.
Well, for starters, you don't have to have your apps containerized to work with Nomad (though it can handle containers as well as executables).
But for some deeper details, I'd suggest checking out the comments in this reddit thread[0] (as well as some of the linked articles therein).
E.g. From a comment by /u/Golden_Age_Fallacy: A great use of Nomad is on reduce the burden of on-boarding a team(s) of developers who are unfamiliar with cloud native deployments / systems(even containers!).
Nomad jobspecs are very simple and straight forward, as compared to the complexity and pure option overload you get in k8s and helm.
From /u/neutralized: It's much easier to use than k8s. Easy to setup, easy to manage, much more shallow learning curve. Nothing super fancy. Just works. I migrated a startup I was at off of a self-managed k8s setup to Nomad a few years ago and they've never looked back.
From /u/esity: My team is currently building out a fully automated nomad cluster service offering internally(fortune 10)
It's super awesome. Easy. Little headache. Integrates with consul and vault. We are literally planning to replace thousands of vms for K8s with nomad. Containers are faster, more resilient and writing hcl is actually fun once you learn it
Now, there is a rather more lengthy comment, by /u/thomasbuchinger, that goes through the pros and cons he experienced in trying Nomad out and his conclusion is that, while he wouldn't discourage anyone from using it, "k3s and a few well-known simple projects give you 80% of Nomands [sic] features. Are as easy to operate, afford you more options in the future and have a ton of documentation/tutorials...available."
There are more comments in the thread and again links to a bunch of blogposts/articles/etc., including one from fly.io that seemed pretty detailed, discussing the Googly origins of both k8s and Nomad (fly.io used Nomad but found that it wasn't the best fit for them, which is also discussed in their post -- actually, I'm going to put the link to their post below[1], since I think it is worthwhile).
