Ask HN: Are there any open source forks of nomad and consul?

58 points by dev_by_day 2 years ago | 37 comments

Considering hashicorp has moved away from open source, does anyone know if there are any community forks of nomad and consul like there is now OpenTofu for terraform?

muhammadn 2 years ago |

I had been tired of waiting for someone (like Linux Foundation) to step up to provide opensource forks of Nomad and Consul.

Had been 5 months and the new hashicorp's code has been changed (bugfixes, etc) and as the drift from the last opensource code becomes wider (even worst, a major change with major versions), i'm setup an organisation for the community to discuss and help on the future to work on the last opensourced version of consul and nomad.

My organisation depends a lot on consul and nomad and the BSL makes it unnecessarily complicated for our case.

https://github.com/OpenHotPot/OpenHotPot (Consul) https://github.com/OpenHotPot/OpenNood (Nomad)

trilobyte 2 years ago |

OpenBao is a fork of Vault. I'm not sure how well-supported the project is, but there is a decent amount of enthusiasm.

hitpointdrew 2 years ago |

Serious question, why not just use kubernetes instead of Nomad?

The only “kinda cool”, thing I saw with Nomad is that it can “orchestrate” binary files, not just containers.

That said, putting binaries in containers isn’t very difficult.

amanzi 2 years ago | |

I like the single-binary approach that Nomad (and Consul) uses. Whereas, Kubernetes feels like a complicated web of services and APIs that need to work together. There's also a bunch of choices that need to be made up front when deploying Kubernetes to decide which distribution to use and which components you may or may not need. Kubernetes is a lot more flexible and powerful than Nomad, but Nomad is a lot easier to deploy and manage.

Axsuul 2 years ago | |

Same reason why you use Ruby instead of Java, Nomad has its own opinionated way of doing things that jives with a lot of people.

hauleth 2 years ago | |

Why use a knife when you can use our EveryThingCutter-9000 that requires a week of training to operate.

mdaniel 2 years ago |

I actually wouldn't get really worked up about it since new owner introduces opportunities for new rules, doubly so given that IBM was one of the participants in OpenTofu so it seems they are more open source fans than not

I've also heard that the fuck-you license change was actually a negotiation tactic for the acquisition

dev_by_day 2 years ago | |

If you look at what IBM did to centos and redhat, its definitely worth getting worked up about.

remram 2 years ago |

I don't think the license for Nomad and Vault is bothering users as much, there are no businesses offering forks of it or SaaS like there were with Terraform (as far as I know).

BillFranklin 2 years ago |

Doesn't look like it.

* https://github.com/hashicorp/nomad/forks

* https://github.com/search?q=nomad%20fork&type=repositories

* https://www.google.com/search?q=hashicorp+nomad+forks

There are products that do similar things of course.

nikisweeting 2 years ago |

It's not at all what you're asking for, but when I last transferred away from Vault I ended up landing on 1Password.

There are still some rough edges but it's been a decent secret store for my small team doing mostly Docker Compose/bare metal stuff.

I'm curious to hear if any other people have managed to use open OR closed-source source password managers as Vault/Consul replacements.

vaishnavsm 2 years ago | |

OpenBao[0] is a fork of Vault under the Linux Foundation

[0] https://openbao.org/

ComputerGuru 2 years ago | |

We use and maintain this cross-platform/cross-lang secrets management option: https://github.com/neosmart/securestore-rs

It keeps secrets out of your environment variables and lets you manage secrets the same way you do code (in lock-step with the code that uses it and as easy to update a secret just by pushing to git), but it's definitely for smaller teams or projects. It also has significantly fewer moving parts or dependencies.

mise_en_place 2 years ago |

You can use etcd for service discovery...that's how k8s does it, no? As for nomad I never used it much, but did like that you could run things locally and have unified environments. I would recommend Nix but we all know what's going on there, sadly FOSS has been consumed by political infighting as well.

voakbasda 2 years ago | |

For those who were unaware of the Nix situation (like me):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40199153

klooney 2 years ago | |

I think etcd is basically a k8s only project now- Consul has a ton of quality of life stuff added on.

There's always Zookeeper.

otterley 2 years ago | | |

Anything but Zookeeper! It was written long before the cloud was a thing, relies on hard-coded IPs, and is practically impossible to operate idiomatically in a cloud environment (unless you’re using statefulsets in K8S to paper over it). It has served us well over the past two decades, but it’s nigh time to give it the proper burial ceremony it deserves.

mdaniel 2 years ago | | |

> I think etcd is basically a k8s only project now

I hate etcd with the best of them, but etcd is used in a lot more places than just kubernetes:

https://github.com/apache/apisix/blob/master/docs/en/latest/...

https://github.com/traefik/traefik#:~:text=Etcd,

https://github.com/zalando/patroni#patroni-a-template-for-po...

https://github.com/purpleidea/mgmt/tree/0.0.26/etcd (this one shows up on HN quite a bit)

https://github.com/sorintlab/stolon#features

It's actually one of the major reasons I wouldn't touch those projects

iamawacko 2 years ago |

It doesn't seem so.

I really love Nomad's UX, so I hope we get one sometime soon-ish.

dev_by_day 2 years ago | |

I will start one if there is community interest, which it seems like there is.

stackskipton 2 years ago |

Not that I've found and it would make sense there isn't really. Kubernetes with all it's warts is clear Nomad equivalent and insert random Kubernetes service mesh here.

I know neither of them are as nicely opinioned at those two services but there is starting to be plenty of more opinioned Kubernetes deployments.

andix 2 years ago | |

Could you maybe elaborate on what you consider an opinionated kubernetes deployment? Are there some open source projects you find promising?

stackskipton 2 years ago | | |

Opinionated meaning it picks, install, patches your CNI/Ingress/Load Balancer/DNS Server/Metrics Server/Monitoring Setup.

k3s is probably most well known as it ships with bunch of preinstall software: https://github.com/k3s-io/k3s so you can just start throwing yaml files at cluster and handling workloads. It's what I use for my homelab.

Paid things I've heard of include OpenStack and SideroLabs. Haven't used personally by SRE coworkers say good things about them.

markhahn 2 years ago | |

Really weird to see "opinionated" used as a good thing.

stackskipton 2 years ago | | |

Most people, including Tech people, with software just want a list of sensible defaults out of the box. You are installing Calico, Ingress-Nginx, CoreDNS, MetalLB, cert-manager and ArgoCD out of the box? Cool, some deployment/service/ingress YAML later and my workloads are cooking.

As SRE who deals with a ton of Kubernetes clusters, I find a ton of needlessly complex clusters because rookies setting up the clusters didn't understand the implications of their actions and grabbed whatever a blog post said was good idea.

vvoruganti 2 years ago |

There is https://www.serf.io/ which is a Hashicorp project as well, but the license doesn't seem as bad as nomad and from what I understand it's the basis for things like nomad and consul.

Learned about it in this blog post: https://fly.io/blog/building-clusters-with-serf/

jsiepkes 2 years ago | |

> Serf is a decentralized solution for service discovery and orchestration that is lightweight, highly available, and fault tolerant.

I'm confused. Isn't that what consul originally was?

chucky_z 2 years ago | | |

Serf is used within Consul for agent to agent checks (and some communication). There's an entire subsystem called the 'serf check' that shows up within every single Consul agent. It's one component of the entire 'Consul' system.

oarmstrong 2 years ago | | |

Consul is built upon the Serf library. https://www.serf.io/intro/vs-consul.html

stryan 2 years ago | | |

IIRC Serf is mostly a library; I think the product around it is more for demonstration than actual expected use. Consul uses libserf for it's gossip protocol.