Jenkins vs Azure DevOps Pipelines
I would love to get some clarity too maybe from a more authoritative source than myself (I'm sure I'm guilty of FUD too).

I've been looking to deploy to Azure using Kubernetes.  I am similarly confused but I think that is because there isn't one clear path.  I can't speak for Microsoft but their attitude to cloud seems to be they are happy to become "all things to all men".  If you are using Azure, Microsoft don't seem to have a strong opinion on how you get there. 

Microsoft are actively trying to evolve; e.g. 
Linux now dominates Azure



Clearly Azure DevOps deployment pipeline does exactly what Jenkins can do - so in that sense it is a competitor.  There is also that slightly off-putting upfront Azure DevOps pricing for parallel pipelines.

On the one hand, Azure DevOps appears to be a re-branding of Visual Studio Team Services.  So it will be familiar to people already within the traditional Microsoft development ecosystem.  At the same time Microsoft are making great efforts to embrace technologies that are not traditionally Microsoft (Go, Java, Node.js, Python, Ruby, PHP etc).

It is early days - but it is not a surprise that Azure DevOps pipelines should prefer the Microsoft Git properties of Azure Repos and GitHub.  In the same way that BitBucket pipelines prefers BitBucket and GitLab pipelines prefer GitLab.



Meanwhile;

The Azure Marketplace offers a Jenkins deployment that comes with Azure deployment plugins out of the box.

Many Jenkins plugins have been developed by the Azure DevOps team.



in addition;

Microsoft have put their backing behind Kubernetes related projects Helm and Draft.  Helm is a package manager for Kubernetes.  You can even use Helm to deploy a Jenkins installation into Kubernetes.

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It would be interesting to see someone weigh up the benefits, costs and effort of running your own Jenkins in Azure verses using Azure DevOps pipelines.

... and then there is Jenkins-X.

So it would seem we have many options and decisions to make.