Ah yes, pipelines do make a difference in configuring jobs. However, how are you managing your plugins? Your Jenkins configs? Most likely those are manual (however if you've found a way that works well, please share). I've also found that for some functionality, I've had to add Groovy into my pipelines.

That said, pipelines has made a HUGE difference. I still want to migrate but this fixes a large pain point.

> (however if you've found a way that works well, please share)

Not extremely well, but I did a small PoC where Jenkins is running in Kubernetes without persistent storage. Plugins are installed on boot with install-plugins.sh (part of Jenkins' Docker image) and configuration is done via Groovy scripts in init.groovy.d (stuff like https://gist.github.com/Buzer/5148372464e2481a797091682fabba...). It's not perfect (e.g. I didn't have time to find out good way to store & import old builds) & it does require some digging around to find how plugins actually do their configuration.

Plugins and configuration are a given, but it’s something you do once upfront as part of the setup. Not sure how other tools handle this, though.

And yes, you do end up needing to use Groovy for anything non-trivial.

And then somebody needs a different, incompatible, version of plugin X and you set up another Jenkins master.

Or upgrade the the Jenkins master and watch other jobs fail.

And not to mention plugin Y and plugin Z crashing Jenkins when being run together because they share the same classpath.

While in the meantime one of the developer is trying to migrate his pipeline from one master to another and he finds out that of course they won't work because the plugins and configuration are not exactly the same.

This is exactly what OP was complaining about. You don't set up plugins and configuration just once. You want them to be replicable, but Jenkins does not provide a good way to do that.

Most other CI/CD system handle this issue very simply. They just don't have plugins, and have very little (if any) global configuration. This means you can start up an entirely new cluster and chances are your pipeline files will run without a hitch.

Try this: https://github.com/jenkinsci/configuration-as-code-plugin

And prior to that there were other solutions built around manipulating the Jenkins API, eg: https://docs.openstack.org/infra/jenkins-job-builder/

(My company switched from JJB to pipelines in the last year and has found it pretty decent.)