Kubernetes vs. Docker Swarm vs. Nomad: A 2024 Infrastructure Reality Check

Let's be honest: 90% of the companies I consult for in Oslo don't need the complexity they are currently paying for. I recently audited a startup running a simple monolithic Magento shop on a 15-node Kubernetes cluster. They were burning through budget faster than a heater in a Norwegian winter, all for the sake of "Resume Driven Development."

It is February 2024. The container orchestration landscape has matured, but the confusion hasn't settled. You have the industry standard that everyone hates to love (Kubernetes), the "dead" project that refuses to die (Docker Swarm), and the streamlined alternative for the minimalists (Nomad). Choosing the wrong one introduces latency, security holes, and unnecessary complexity.

This guide cuts through the marketing noise. We are looking at raw performance, operational overhead, and how these stacks behave on high-performance infrastructure like CoolVDS.

The 800lb Gorilla: Kubernetes (v1.29)

Kubernetes (K8s) won the war. That is indisputable. With the release of v1.29 "Mandala" late last year, it has become even more stable. However, K8s is not a platform; it is a platform for building platforms. If you are a team of two developers, managing a control plane is a waste of cycles.

Where K8s Breaks

The biggest bottleneck I see in production isn't CPU; it's I/O latency in etcd. If your underlying storage isn't pushing serious IOPS, your cluster state gets out of sync, leading to the dreaded CrashLoopBackOff.

Pro Tip: Always mount your etcd data directory on a dedicated NVMe partition. On CoolVDS instances, we see write latencies under 0.5ms, which is critical for cluster stability.

Here is a snippet from a highly optimized etcd.yaml configuration we used for a high-traffic media site in Bergen:

# etcd.yaml optimization for low-latency environments
quota-backend-bytes: 8589934592
auto-compaction-retention: "1"
# High performance disk priority
wal-dir: /var/lib/etcd/wal
data-dir: /var/lib/etcd/data
# Heartbeat interval (adjust based on network latency to NIX)
heartbeat-interval: 100
election-timeout: 1000

If you aren't tweaking these values, you aren't running K8s; you're just hoping it works.

The Zombie: Docker Swarm

"Swarm is dead," they said in 2019. "Mirantis killed it," they said in 2020. Yet, here we are in 2024, and Swarm is still the fastest way to go from zero to clustered. It lacks the rich CRD (Custom Resource Definition) ecosystem of K8s, but it has one massive advantage: simplicity.

For a recent client needing GDPR compliance without the headache of managing a cloud control plane, we deployed a 3-node Swarm on CoolVDS. The setup time? 15 minutes.

The mesh networking in Swarm is less configurable than CNI plugins in K8s, but it works out of the box. However, be wary of the overlay network overhead on standard VPS providers. You need jumbo frames support or low-level network optimization to avoid packet fragmentation.

version: '3.9'
services:
  web:
    image: nginx:alpine
    deploy:
      replicas: 4
      update_config:
        parallelism: 2
        delay: 10s
      restart_policy:
        condition: on-failure
    ports:
      - target: 80
        published: 80
        protocol: tcp
        mode: host # Bypass the routing mesh for raw performance

Note the mode: host. This bypasses Swarm's routing mesh, binding directly to the node's port. This is essential for low-latency applications serving traffic directly to Nordic ISPs.

The Hipster Choice: HashiCorp Nomad

Nomad is the UNIX philosophy applied to orchestration: do one thing and do it well. It schedules applications. It doesn't care about networking (use Consul) or secrets (use Vault). Since HashiCorp's move to the BSL license last year, some teams got nervous, but for internal hosting, it remains technically superior for mixed workloads (Docker + Java JARs + binaries).

Nomad's memory footprint is laughable compared to the Kubelet. You can run a Nomad client on a 1GB VPS and still have room for your app.

job "api-service" {
  datacenters = ["oslo-dc1"]
  type = "service"

  group "api" {
    count = 3
    
    network {
      port "http" {
        to = 8080
      }
    }

    task "server" {
      driver = "docker"
      config {
        image = "my-registry/api:v2.4"
      }
      
      resources {
        cpu    = 500 # 500 MHz
        memory = 256 # 256MB
      }
    }
  }
}

Performance Benchmarks: NIX Latency

We ran a synthetic load test (wrk2) against all three orchestrators hosted on identical CoolVDS 4 vCPU / 8GB RAM instances located in Norway. The target was a simple Go HTTP server.

Kubernetes loses on raw throughput due to the iptables/IPVS overhead and sidecar proxies often injected by service meshes. Nomad wins because it stays out of the way.

The Sovereignty Angle: Why Infrastructure Matters

Software doesn't run on air. It runs on metal. In 2024, reliance on US-based hyperscalers involves navigating a legal minefield regarding data transfers (Schrems II). Running your own orchestration layer on Norwegian VPS providers like CoolVDS isn't just a technical decision; it's a compliance strategy.

CoolVDS offers the KVM virtualization backbone that prevents the "noisy neighbor" effect common in container-optimized OS environments. When you control the node, you control the data residence.

Final Verdict

• Choose Kubernetes if you need the ecosystem, are hiring a large team, or require complex CRDs.
• Choose Docker Swarm if you have a small team, a standard web stack, and want to sleep at night.
• Choose Nomad if you want maximum resource efficiency and need to mix non-containerized workloads.

Whatever you choose, the bottleneck will eventually be the disk I/O or the network. Don't let slow infrastructure kill your orchestration strategy. Deploy a high-frequency NVMe instance on CoolVDS today and see what your cluster is actually capable of.