Kubernetes vs. Docker Swarm vs. Nomad: The 2024 Reality Check

Let’s be honest for a second. Most of you deploying Kubernetes today don't need it. You are taking a simple three-tier application and wrapping it in a layer of complexity so dense that you need a dedicated team just to manage the YAML files. I've seen startups in Oslo burn 40% of their seed funding on AWS EKS fees and "DevOps consultants" before they even acquired their first customer.

As of April 2024, the orchestration landscape has settled. Kubernetes won the popularity contest, but for many, it’s a pyrrhic victory. If you are running a lean operation in Europe, specifically targeting the Nordic market where reliability is non-negotiable, you need to choose based on latency and maintenance overhead, not resume-padding buzzwords.

The Latency Killer: It's Not Your Code, It's Your Disk

Before we argue about schedulers, we need to address the hardware. An orchestrator is only as fast as the underlying node's I/O.

I recently debugged a Kubernetes cluster for a fintech client in Bergen. They were seeing random 502 errors on their Nginx ingress. The logs were clean. The CPU was idle. The culprit? Etcd disk latency. They were hosting on a budget VPS provider that throttled IOPS.

Etcd (the brain of Kubernetes) is incredibly sensitive to disk write latency. If fsync takes longer than a few milliseconds, the cluster becomes unstable. This is where the "CoolVDS factor" comes in—we don't oversell our storage arrays. When you get an NVMe slice here, you get the raw throughput required to keep Etcd happy.

The Benchmark Test

Don't trust the brochure. Run this on your current node. If your write IOPS are under 10k, don't even think about running a production K8s cluster.

fio --name=etcd_test \
    --rw=write --ioengine=libaio --fdatasync=1 \
    --size=1G --bs=2300 --iodepth=1 \
    --numjobs=1 --runtime=60 --group_reporting

If that command returns anything less than 50MB/s synced write speed, your orchestration layer will eventually fail under load.

1. Kubernetes (The Heavy Artillery)

Best for: Teams of 5+ DevOps engineers, multi-cloud requirements, massive scaling.

Kubernetes (v1.29 is the current stable standard as of early 2024) is powerful. But it demands respect. You don't just "install" it. You architect it.

The complexity comes from the networking layer (CNI). In a typical Norwegian setup, you need to worry about GDPR compliance (Schrems II). If you use a managed US cloud K8s, who holds the encryption keys? Hosting on a sovereign Norwegian VPS like CoolVDS with a self-managed K3s or RKE2 cluster is often the only way to satisfy strict Datatilsynet requirements.

Typical Config Pitfall: Ignoring Resource Quotas.

apiVersion: v1
kind: ResourceQuota
metadata:
  name: compute-resources
spec:
  hard:
    requests.cpu: "4"
    requests.memory: 8Gi
    limits.cpu: "8"
    limits.memory: 16Gi

Without this, a memory leak in one pod will OOM-kill your entire node. I've seen it crash a payment gateway on Black Friday.

2. Docker Swarm (The Pragmatic Choice)

Best for: Small to medium teams, simple microservices, people who hate YAML.

Industry pundits keep saying Swarm is dead. Yet, here we are in 2024, and it's still built into Docker Engine. Why? Because it works. If you have 5 nodes and need high availability, Swarm takes 5 minutes to set up.

There is no separate Etcd database to manage (it's internal). The learning curve is flat.

Pro Tip: Use CoolVDS's private networking to bind your Swarm managers. Public exposure of the management port (2377) is a security suicide note.

The Deployment Simplicity:

version: "3.9"
services:
  web:
    image: nginx:alpine
    deploy:
      replicas: 5
      update_config:
        parallelism: 2
        delay: 10s
      restart_policy:
        condition: on-failure

That's it. No Helm charts, no IngressControllers. It just runs.

3. Nomad (The Unix Philosophy)

Best for: Mixed workloads (Binaries + Docker + Java), high performance.

Nomad by HashiCorp is the unsung hero. Unlike K8s, it doesn't try to be your network manager or your storage controller. It just schedules work. It is a single binary.

We see a lot of high-performance shops in Northern Europe moving to Nomad because it has lower overhead than K8s. When milliseconds matter—like in high-frequency trading or real-time ad bidding connected to NIX (Norwegian Internet Exchange)—the Kube-proxy overhead is noticeable. Nomad gets out of the way.

The Network: Latency to Oslo

Your orchestration strategy means nothing if your packets are taking the scenic route through Frankfurt. For Norwegian businesses, physical proximity to the NIX in Oslo is critical.

When you deploy a cluster, the latency between nodes (East-West traffic) and the latency to the user (North-South traffic) defines the user experience.

• Hyperscalers: Often route traffic through Sweden or Denmark/Germany before hitting Norway. Latency: 15-30ms.
• CoolVDS: Local peering. Latency: 1-3ms within Oslo.

This difference allows you to run synchronous database replication without killing write performance.

Configuring Keepalived for High Availability

If you aren't using a cloud load balancer, you need a floating IP. Here is a standard configuration we use for failover on CoolVDS instances:

vrrp_instance VI_1 {
    state MASTER
    interface eth0
    virtual_router_id 51
    priority 100
    advert_int 1
    authentication {
        auth_type PASS
        auth_pass s3cret
    }
    virtual_ipaddress {
        192.168.10.100
    }
}

This script ensures that if your primary ingress node dies, the IP shifts to the backup in less than a second. Simple. Effective. No cloud vendor lock-in.

Conclusion: Match the Tool to the Metal

If you are Google, use Kubernetes. If you are a dev shop with 10 engineers, use Docker Swarm or K3s. If you need raw speed and mixed workloads, look at Nomad.

But regardless of the software, the foundation remains the same. You need KVM virtualization that guarantees no CPU stealing (noisy neighbors) and NVMe storage that can handle the I/O storm of a container cluster.

Don't let a slow disk destroy your orchestration strategy. Spin up a CoolVDS NVMe instance today and see what your containers act like when the brakes are taken off.