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!
You need to explain better why should I move to GitHub repos from Azure Repos beyond just upgrading to Enterprise license
The “why” behind the recommendation is captured in the first sentence of the second paragraph above: “Copilot’s agentic capabilities are most powerful when your code lives in GitHub.” See GitHub Copilot: meet the new coding agent for more detail on those agentic capabilities.
I know this may well be a wider question but I want to ask as we are about to move more of our whole company over to using Azure DevOps. However this post and the linked github post at the end, states people should migrate evrthing GitHub. Although you are only talking about migrating the Git repository from DevOps to GitHub in this post - does this mean you and the wider Azure DevOps team will NOT be adding the same capabilities GitHub has to Azure Devops?
e.g. the new Copilot coding agent e.g. where you can assign an Issue...
We do not plan to bring GitHub Copilot capabilities to Azure DevOps natively. Of course, many GitHub Copilot capabilities are surfaced in IDEs such as Visual Studio and VS Code - these are available to Azure DevOps customers and can even leverage the newly announced Azure DevOps MCP server when it is available. But capabilities like the new coding agent are not coming to Azure DevOps.
This does not mean that we are no longer investing in Azure DevOps, however. See our public roadmap for a high-level overview of our plans for the next 6+ months. Generally, our focus in...