GitHub Copilot has evolved beyond a coding assistant in the IDE into an agentic teammate – providing actionable feedback on pull requests, fixing bugs and implementing new features, creating pull requests and responding to feedback, and much more. These new capabilities will transform every aspect of the software development lifecycle, as we are already seeing on our own teams within Microsoft and GitHub.
Copilot’s agentic capabilities are most powerful when your code lives in GitHub, and that’s why we’ve been working hard to make the experience of using GitHub, Copilot, and Azure DevOps seamless. Now is the time to migrate your Azure DevOps repositories to GitHub, so your teams can fully harness the power of Copilot while still benefiting from your existing investments in Azure Boards and Pipelines.
Migrating repositories from Azure Repos to GitHub
We’ve done a lot of work across Microsoft and GitHub to make it easier for Azure DevOps customers to migrate their repositories to GitHub. This includes:
- Migration tooling, guidance, and support. We’ve been hard at work refining the capabilities of GitHub Enterprise Importer, the tooling used to migrate repositories into GitHub. Many Azure DevOps customers have already used it to seamlessly migrate hundreds of thousands of repositories – including full history, branches, and critical metadata – on their own, or with the help of GitHub Expert Services and/or partners.
- GitHub Enterprise Cloud with Data Residency. Azure DevOps is deployed in nine Azure geographies. Until recently, Azure DevOps customers who relied on data residency outside the United State didn’t have a good option in GitHub. GitHub now has GitHub Enterprise Cloud with Data Residency deployments in Europe, Australia, and the United States, with more on the way.
- Improved integrations for Azure Boards and Pipelines with GitHub repositories. We’ve been shipping a steady stream of integration improvements to our Azure Boards app, along with scalability and reliability improvements to our Azure Pipelines app. The end-to-end experience of using Azure Boards and Pipelines with GitHub repositories is at this point comparable to the experience Azure Repos customers are used to.
Other areas of Azure DevOps, like Test Plans, are areas of ongoing investment and also work well when your code is in GitHub. Today their primary integration points are with areas like Pipelines rather than with repositories, but as they evolve we will ensure that they work great with GitHub repositories as well.
- Inclusion of Azure DevOps basic use rights with GitHub Enterprise licenses. As of this past February, Azure DevOps Basic usage rights are included with GitHub Enterprise licenses. This means you can migrate your repositories to GitHub and continue using Azure Boards and Pipelines without having to pay for both products separately. More than 200,000 users are already benefiting from this integration, gaining access to Azure DevOps through their GitHub Enterprise licenses.
Putting all that together, Azure DevOps customers now have a clear and reliable path to migrate their repositories to GitHub so their teams can get the most out of the latest capabilities of GitHub Copilot.
Try Copilot now – no need to wait!
Of course, migrating repositories takes time! And while you are charting your course, GitHub Copilot can provide substantial benefits even while your repositories are hosted in Azure Repos. This now includes Agent Mode and Next Edit suggestions in both Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code, for example.
One more thing…
Finally, we’re excited to announce that an official Azure DevOps Model Context Protocol (MCP) Server is coming soon! This will benefit all Azure DevOps customers by enabling GitHub Copilot to interact with and operate on Azure DevOps data.
The Azure DevOps MCP server will enable you to summarize a work item, including the discussion history; generate a Test Case with structured test steps based on the description of a Task or User Story; de-deduplicate and re-order your backlog based on custom criteria; decompose a User Story into child Tasks with auto-generated titles and descriptions for each; and so much more – all from GitHub Copilot chat. We are so excited about the possibilities here and can’t wait to get your feedback!
Azure DevOps with GitHub repos and Copilot
GitHub Copilot’s new agentic capabilities are transforming the software development lifecycle. To benefit fully from these new features, we encourage Azure DevOps customers to migrate their repositories to GitHub while continuing to use other capabilities in Azure DevOps, and we’ve built deep connections between the two products to make this feel like using one connected ecosystem.
To learn more about how to start your journey with Azure DevOps and GitHub, check out our Build session – “Making Azure DevOps and GitHub Greater Than the Sum of Their Parts“.
Start your journey today and see why so many teams have already migrated. And check out this post from our friends at GitHub to learn more about the benefits of migrating your repos to take advantage of agentic innovation.
Thanks for reading, and we can’t wait to see what you create!
Thank you for sharing this update. I have to admit, though, that it’s quite discouraging news for Azure DevOps customers and the broader ecosystem. It feels like the previous assurances from Microsoft about maintaining support for both source providers are starting to fade…
As the maintainer of the current highest-starred MCP Server for Azure DevOps. I’m very excited to see the MCP server land! It’s very high demand tool and would love to see it move faster than I can push it solo.
For a quarterly objective (in late 2023, maybe early 2024) our team researched whether or not it made sense to migrate to GitHub. We had about 10 criteria that were important to our SDLC workflow that we considered and compared the offering in DevOps to GitHub. In almost all cases GitHub was either "the same", "worse", or "did not have parody". We will not be migrating to GitHub. If MS decides to deprecate DevOps, we would have to consider other providers such as Bitbucket, etc.
It's of my opinion that GitHub is for open-source and personal projects, and DevOps is tailored...
I’ll emphasize again (esp for @Stephen Parsons, who explicitly called out Azure Boards) that this post is only recommending migration of repositories. We’ve put a lot of effort into improving the integrations between Azure Boards and GitHub repositories because we do understand that Boards and Projects are quite differentiated.
Hey! I’m Mickey Gousset, a DevOps Architect over at GitHub. I would love to get some details on your criteria if you felt like sharing. If so, feel free to email me at mickeygousset at github dot com.
My experiences have also led me to be weary of migrating to GitHub from ADO. I’d be interested in sharing detailed feedback as well if you’d like it
Would be also interested in sharing insights and blockers from our organisation. We use Azure DevOps heavily, across many squads all working with a mature agile process, and the biggest blocker for us it the work planning piece (or Boards as it's referred to). We can't see a matching experience as rich as that in GitHub, not even close yet. It seems fine for managing Kanban across a few teams, but there's no Sprint boards, or the customisation and dashboarding that goes with that.
We don't want to move all of our git repos, IaC and pipeline management to GitHub,...
@Will Hermann
If you can share, I’m interested in your criteria and findings too. If it’s too big to respond here, my email is chrismconti at gmail dot com
This is just so disappointing that instead of just making Azure DevOps Work with GitHub or offering some bridge I am forced to choose to leave DevOps after a tremendous amount of personal and professional investment in the application. Now, in order to use products from the vast AI landscape for code generation, we must first embark on a monumental task of migrating off Azure DevOps, what kind of stupid strategy is this? Microsoft just keeps chipping away at my confidence and backing us into a corner with these kind of "If you want to use something cool,...
A big chunk of this post is exactly about the work we’ve been doing around “…making Azure DevOps work with GitHub”! And the repository migration discussed here doesn’t need to be monumental. Start with a single repository – see how you like it and what benefits you get from having access to the latest agentic AI experiences in GitHub. Keep using your existing Boards / Pipelines / Test / etc. investments in Azure DevOps. Expand from there when you are ready.
Honestly it sounds to me like MS is really pushing everyone away from Azure DevOps repos to Github. Almost all the investment in ADO, outside security, is around better integration with GitHub. While I understand GitHub is the largest open source repo in the world, articles like this make it pretty clear that MS is investing their time in improving GitHub to the point where ADO itself isn't needed and they can just have everyone use GitHub.
To me the writing is on the wall, just MS isn't ready to make that announcement yet. I'm waiting for the day MS...
Following the article after demo at Microsoft Build, it's great that we can update work items with Copilot via MCP. Do you plan to implement this as a whole part of Azure DevOps on the roadmap(new changes)? We solve many problems by opening Copilot in the Azure Portal, but it's a matter of curiosity when a feature like Ask Copilot will be introduced to Azure DevOps, allowing project management teams to work more efficiently. While we can process the issue's content with GitHub Copilot, we are still trying to manage it with extensions in Azure DevOps. We can move to...
As a Developer it would be helpful if this was the other way around. Finance has no interest in touching existing contracts for something that “works fine today”.