A Comparative Analysis of Self-Hosted Nomad and Managed Kubernetes for Container Orchestration

Containerization has become central to scalable application deployment, driving the rise of microservice architectures. While these architectures enhance modularity and scalability, they introduce operational complexity that necessitates robust orchestration solutions. However, there is limited empirical research comparing widely used orchestrators (particularly managed Kubernetes services and alternatives like Nomad) in real-world cloud environments. This paper addresses this gap by evaluating the performance, cost efficiency, and scalability of AWS Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) versus a self-hosted Nomad deployment on AWS, using controlled experiments that simulate production conditions. Our experimental results provide practical guidance for choosing between managed and self-hosted orchestration solutions based on workload demands and operational constraints (e.g., our results showed that Nomad achieves up to 20% lower request latency and 3.6× lower infrastructure costs compared to EKS in small-to-medium scale deployments).