Nomad vs YARN Hadoop: What are the differences?

Introduction

In this article, we will explore the key differences between Nomad and YARN Hadoop. Both Nomad and YARN Hadoop are resource schedulers used in cluster management, but they differ in several ways.

1. Design and Philosophy: Nomad is designed as a lightweight and flexible scheduler for both long-running services and batch jobs. It focuses on simplicity and ease of use, allowing users to run any kind of workload. On the other hand, YARN Hadoop is designed specifically for big data processing and is tightly integrated with the Hadoop ecosystem.

2. Resource Management: Nomad uses a declarative approach to resource management, where users define their desired state and Nomad ensures that the tasks are scheduled and allocated resources accordingly. YARN Hadoop, however, uses a hierarchical approach to resource management with central control. It has a ResourceManager that manages the global allocation of resources and individual NodeManagers that manage resources on individual hosts.

3. Multi-Tenancy Support: Nomad supports multi-tenancy out of the box. It allows users to run multiple workloads securely in a shared cluster, with each workload isolated from the others. YARN Hadoop, on the other hand, provides limited multi-tenancy support through the use of queues and capacity management policies.

4. Integration with Ecosystem: Nomad is a standalone scheduler and is not tightly integrated with any specific ecosystem. It can run a variety of workloads such as Docker containers, VMs, and even standalone applications. YARN Hadoop, on the other hand, is part of the Hadoop ecosystem and seamlessly integrates with other Hadoop components like HDFS, MapReduce, and Hive.

5. Fault Tolerance: Nomad has built-in fault tolerance mechanisms that ensure high availability of applications. It automatically handles node failures, reschedules tasks, and redistributes resources. YARN Hadoop also provides fault tolerance through its ResourceManager and NodeManager architecture, but it relies on HDFS for data replication and recovery.

6. Ease of Deployment: Nomad is known for its ease of deployment. It has a simple and lightweight architecture, making it easy to set up and manage. YARN Hadoop, on the other hand, has a more complex setup process due to its integration with the Hadoop ecosystem and its dependency on HDFS.

In summary, Nomad and YARN Hadoop differ in their design philosophy, resource management approach, multi-tenancy support, integration with the ecosystem, fault tolerance mechanisms, and ease of deployment.