An Analysis of Performance and Resource Efficiency in Modern Orchestration Platforms for Legacy Workloads

Legacy.NET applications pose significant challenges for modern enterprises, particularly when considering new security regulations like the Cyber Resilience Act. Also, enterprises are often reluctant to invest in, or modify them, due to potential downtime, limited in-house expertise, and the cost of updating outdated code bases. Nevertheless, enterprises must still ensure the security and reliability of these legacy systems. To contribute to addressing these challenges, this paper presents a comparative analysis assessing the feasibility of migrating these legacy applications to the Kubernetes and Nomad orchestration platforms. This involved conducting an experimental evaluation using three real-world legacy.NET applications deployed on both platforms. Performance and resource metrics were collected, under controlled load conditions, using standard tools and test configurations. Our results offer insightful advice for practitioners interested in using these technologies to address this sort of business needs such as Kubernetes exhibiting significantly higher resource consumption (e.g., Nomad reduces CPU usage by 50%), while Nomad lacking certain enterprise-grade features (e.g., limited support for advanced network policies and ingress).