NiFi User Community: TLDR: We would like to hear your thoughts on how we best communicate to the user base about the importance of moving to NiFi 2.x.
The NiFi 1.x line has enjoyed more than 8 full years of strong support and guarantees as it relates to Java 8 compatibility, flow compatibility from release to release, and we've on average produced more than 4 releases per year throughout that time. For the past three years though the NiFi developer base has recognized the 1.x line has reached its natural conclusion phase as EOL was declared or being declared soon for key components we rely on to maintain those NiFi 1.x guarantees for the users. These are critical components such as the underlying JVM, key application framework dependencies like Spring, and Jetty, our front-end codebase and many other smaller but important libraries we rely on. To address this we set about creating for and executing a plan towards a better future for the NiFi project called NiFi 2.0. During the past year we've created four different milestone releases of the Apache NiFi 2.x line and many users are already there including production users as well as vendor supported users outside the NiFi open source community who have relied on NiFi 2.x for nearly a year. Yesterday we're very pleased to have finally reached a point where the NIFi 2.0 line is now officially GA. We encourage all users to migrate to it or make plans to migrate to it as soon as practical. We realize for some users that it creates hardship and we remain committed to minimizing such difficulties while also ensuring we have a strong path forward to continue to evolve and grow the project and user base. There are many new components in the 2.x line and many old components no longer present at all or by default on the 2.x line. The UI is completely new but should be very familiar. You have to move to a base of Java 21. Flows (the json form) by and large should migrate well or when they don't we make the cases often quite manageable but it will require in some cases user effort. We renamed some things which will create some complexity. The net of it is moving from 1.x to 2.x is more work and harder than moving from any previous 1.x release to a 1.x-next release. Meanwhile, as I described, the NiFi 1.x line has reached a point where addressing many classes of vulnerabile libraries is simply not possible. The 2.x line by comparison was just released with our first ever entirely clean vulnerability scan (compared to 100s of libs in the 1.x line). We recognize some users will take a long time to migrate. The NiFi 1.x line will remain available for a very very long time. However, we don't want users to be misled in any way thinking we'll be available or able to fix vulnerabilities or even analyze them reasonably on 1.x. The ask to the user base then is what would be a helpful way of communicating to the user base the importance of migrating and how to seek help/ask questions? Where would you look for this information or expect it to be? Would you expect us to call this 'End of Life' 'End of support' etc..? Thanks
