Look, I'm going to level with you. After spending 3 years debugging Kubernetes networking at 2 AM and watching our AWS bill swing from $30K to $85K in a month because someone forgot to set resource limits, I started looking at alternatives. Not because I hate K8s (okay, maybe a little), but because sometimes there's a better way that doesn't require a PhD in YAML archeology.
The Kubernetes Tax is Real
First, let's talk about what Kubernetes actually costs. Not the marketing bullshit about "enterprise-grade orchestration", but the real cost of running this beast. The hidden expenses include cluster management fees, egress traffic costs, and the platform team salaries nobody talks about in the vendor demos.
Our OpenShift cluster cost us something like $187K annually - at least that's what showed up in procurement. Probably way more with all the random shit they tack on that you don't find out about until renewal time. Three platform engineers at $163K, $155K, and $171K respectively because we hired at different times and the market got weird. Plus that contractor we had to bring in when everything went to hell during the Black Friday deployment - $18K for three weeks of "expert consultation" that mostly involved googling error messages we'd already googled. Total annual cost: somewhere north of $780K. For container orchestration.
The breaking point came when we spent 6 weeks troubleshooting a service mesh networking issue that turned out to be some fucked up interaction between our Calico CNI plugin v3.24.1 and Istio 1.18.2 sidecar injection. The error logs just kept saying PERMISSION_DENIED: connect_error which tells you jack shit about what's actually wrong. There's a known GitHub issue about this exact problem with Calico eBPF mode. The "fix"? Turn off the sidecar injector, restart all the pods in a specific order while holding your breath, then turn it back on. Two weeks later it broke again with the exact same meaningless error message.
HashiCorp Nomad: Simple Until It Isn't
Nomad is what happens when someone looks at Kubernetes and goes "this is fucking insane, let's try again." Single binary, job files that don't make your eyes bleed, no YAML archaeology. I moved our batch processing stuff to Nomad in about 17 days - which honestly shocked the hell out of me because everything always takes forever. The same shit took us 8 months of pure suffering on Kubernetes.
The Good
Nomad job files actually make sense. Here's a complete job definition:
job "api" {
datacenters = ["dc1"]
group "api" {
count = 3
task "api" {
driver = "docker"
config {
image = "myapp:latest"
ports = ["http"]
}
resources {
cpu = 500
memory = 512
}
}
}
}
That's it. No deployments, replica sets, services, ingress controllers, or 47 different YAML files that somehow all need to be perfect.
The Bad
The ecosystem is smaller. No Helm charts. If you need something that only exists as a Kubernetes operator, you're screwed. Also, HashiCorp's licensing changes in 2023 mean the open-source version is frozen at v1.6.1. Enterprise pricing contact starts around $2K per month for a decent cluster - which sounds reasonable until you realize that doesn't include Consul or Vault, and you definitely need both.
Reality Check
Cloudflare runs Nomad at completely insane scale, but they've got like 30 people who do nothing but Nomad all day. Your 10-person startup where Dave is the "cloud guy" probably won't see the same magic.
Podman: Docker That Doesn't Want Root
Podman's big selling point is rootless containers. No daemon running as root, which eliminates about 60% of Docker's security attack surface. I've been running it in production for 18 months, and here's the real story:
Security Actually Matters
We had three Docker daemon privilege escalation attempts in 2023. Zero with Podman, because there's no daemon to escalate through. Our security audit went from 47 container-related findings to 12. Rootless containers eliminate most privilege escalation vectors that plague Docker deployments.
The Migration Pain
Switching from Docker isn't drop-in. `docker-compose` becomes `podman-compose`, and about 20% of our Docker commands needed tweaking. The networking broke everything for like 3 days - kept getting Error: unable to find network with name or ID default: network not found because Podman creates networks differently. Had to run podman network create for every damn thing we were used to just working.
Cost Reality
RHEL subscriptions for 100 nodes run us about $35K annually. Docker Enterprise pricing would have been $42K or so. Not revolutionary savings, but Podman eliminates the need for separate security scanning tools, saving us another $15K - maybe more, hard to calculate exactly. Check out this comprehensive Docker cost analysis for the hidden fees.
What Breaks
Rootless networking can be a nightmare. Port binding below 1024 throws Error: rootlessport cannot expose privileged port 80, you can add 'net.ipv4.ip_unprivileged_port_start=80' to /etc/sysctl.conf - took us 2 days to figure that out. Some container images assume root and just crash with container create failed: OCI runtime error: runc: container_linux.go:380. Plan on rebuilding 10-15% of your container images and cursing whoever decided nginx needed to run as root.
K3s: Kubernetes for People Who Aren't Masochists
K3s is Kubernetes with the stupid parts removed. Single binary, built-in load balancer, actually works on edge devices. We use it for our development environments and smaller production workloads.
Why It's Better
Installation is literally curl -sfL https://get.k3s.io | sh -. Full Kubernetes API compatibility means your existing Helm charts work. Resource usage is about 1/3 of full Kubernetes.
Why It's Not
You're still running Kubernetes, with all the networking complexity that entails. When something breaks, you're debugging the same CNI issues, just with fewer components. The "lightweight" claim falls apart once you add monitoring, logging, and service mesh.
Edge Case Win
We deployed K3s to 200+ retail locations. Each site runs on a $300 Intel NUC. Try doing that with OpenShift - I dare you.
Docker Swarm: Dead But Not Buried
Docker Swarm gets shit on constantly, but for simple workloads, it just works. We still run our staging environments on Swarm because the operational overhead is basically zero.
Swarm Mode Reality
Built into Docker, zero additional components. Service deployment is dead simple. Scales reasonably well up to about 100 nodes. After that, you start hitting limitations around service discovery and load balancing.
The Economics
If you're already paying for Docker Desktop licenses ($9-15/user/month as of 2024), Swarm mode is essentially free. For basic orchestration needs, it's hard to beat. Though watch out - Docker keeps changing their pricing every 18 months, and they'll send you compliance audit threats if you're over your licensed user count.
Why It Died
Docker Inc. stopped caring. The ecosystem moved to Kubernetes. But if you need container orchestration for internal tools or simple applications, Swarm still works fine.
The Real Cost Comparison
Here's what our actual migration looked like over 18 months:
Before (OpenShift + VMware)
- Licensing: $180K annually
- Platform team: 3 engineers ($480K)
- Consulting: $85K
- Total: $745K/year
After (Mixed platform approach)
- K3s for edge: $12K annually (SUSE support)
- Nomad for batch: $24K annually (enterprise)
- Podman for secure workloads: $35K annually (RHEL)
- Platform team: 2 engineers ($320K)
- Total: $391K/year
Annual savings: $354K. Not because the tools are magic, but because we stopped trying to force everything through the same orchestration platform.
What Actually Broke During Migration
Nomad
Service mesh took 3 weeks to configure properly. Consul Connect documentation is garbage. Ended up hiring a HashiCorp consultant for $8K.
Podman
Networking broke our CI/CD pipeline. Container builds failed randomly with Error: error creating container storage: the container name "builder" is already in use even though no container was running. Turns out rootless storage driver keeps ghost containers around after builds fail. Spent 2 weeks rebuilding our entire build pipeline and adding podman system prune -a after every failed build. Lost 2 weeks of productivity because nobody mentioned this in the migration docs.
K3s
Traefik ingress controller conflicts with our existing load balancer setup. SSL termination kept failing with tls: failed to verify certificate: x509: certificate signed by unknown authority because K3s generates its own CA and we were mixing it with our corporate certs. Took 4 days and way too much coffee to figure out we needed to disable the built-in Traefik and use our own ingress controller.
Time to Production
6 months total, including parallel running of old and new systems. Not the "smooth 2-month migration" we planned.
Should You Actually Do This?
Yes, if:
- You're spending $200K+ annually on container platforms
- Your team has Unix/Linux skills (not just Kubernetes)
- You can afford 6-12 months of reduced productivity during migration
- You're tired of debugging CNI issues at 3 AM
No, if:
- You're heavily invested in Kubernetes ecosystem tools
- Your team only knows Kubernetes
- You need every possible feature and operator available
- You can't afford the migration risk and time investment
The alternative container platforms aren't silver bullets. They're different trade-offs. Sometimes simpler is better. Sometimes it's not. But after watching three separate teams spend weeks debugging Kubernetes networking issues that wouldn't exist on simpler platforms, I'm pretty convinced the complexity tax is real.
Choose based on your actual needs, not vendor marketing. And always have a rollback plan, because migration projects never go as smoothly as planned.
