Jenkins(Classic-Static-Core vs X) Pipeline Orchestration Definition

[Firmsoil Soil]

I have been with Jenkins since the freestyle jobs (read pre-pipeline plugin suite) days. 

Question: Why does Cloudbees want users to maintain two pipeline orchestration definition formats i.e. (DECLARATIVE) GROOVY (IN CLASSIC/STATIC/CORE-JENKINS) and YAML (JENKINS-X). What if any is the bottleneck-removal automated migration path/strategy (like freestyle=>pipeline job converter plugin) that Cloudbees offers for their multi-year loyal Pre-JenkinsX users who have invested in their groovy (declarative) Jenkinsfiles to move to jenkins-x.yml when they move their applications (including Jenkins) from VMs to K8.

Thanks much for your consideration in reading above and if possible providing your answer on it.

Firmsoil

[Nofar Bluestein]

Hello Firmsoil, 

Thank you for your question. 

Jenkins and Jenkins X today have very different use cases and target audiences. Jenkins provides the ultimate flexibility configuration and process for general purpose workload automation, supporting the most diverse set of use-cases.
Jenkins X provides a far more opinionated workflow built around GitOps and Kubernetes and is focused on greenfield cloud-native k8s application development and delivery.
Currently there isn't a large overlap between these two types of workloads and workflows, which is why we took the opportunity to make use of the most efficient technologies in Jenkins X to help it meet its use cases.
Due to significant differences between Jenkinsfile and the Tekton based pipelines used by Jenkins X there is currently no automated mechanism to migrate from Jenkins to Jenkins X. We do encourage users that have pipelines that meet the Jenkins X use cases to migrate to Jenkins X. For the time being this will be a manual process. We will provide documentation and other support during this process. It is also a perfect opportunity to refactor your pipelines and make them more efficient.

Regards, 

Nofar Bluestein, 

Product Manager, CloudBees

[Firmsoil Soil]

Hello Nofar,

Thanks very much for your detailed response and product guidance. 

Regards

Firmsoil