Over the last several years, we’ve encouraged customers to move their repositories from Azure Repos to GitHub to take advantage of the latest AI-powered and agentic development experiences.
For many enterprise teams, however, migrating at scale comes with real constraints. Traditional approaches can require extended downtime – sometimes days – which isn’t acceptable for teams running critical workloads.
To address this, we’re introducing Enterprise Live Migrations (ELM), in limited public preview.
Migrations begin without locking the Azure DevOps repository, with changes continuously synchronized to GitHub while developers keep working. When ready, teams can schedule a cutover to complete the transition – with only a brief downtime window, typically under 30 minutes. This means no extended freeze periods, no multi-day outages – just a controlled, predictable transition that fits into your operations. Teams can migrate at their own pace, without coordinating complex, high-risk “all-at-once” migrations.
🪧 Sign up for the Preview
ELM currently supports migrations to GitHub Enterprise Cloud with data residency. A script-based migration experience is available today, with a UI-based experience coming soon to provide a more streamlined end-to-end workflow. We expect to remain in limited public preview over the next couple of months as we continue refining the experience, adding new features, and incorporating customer feedback. Your input is vital to making this experience successful.
If you are interested in participating in the preview, you can sign up today. We will follow up with all the information you need to get started.
🤖 How ELM works
ELM follows a simple, staged workflow:
- Start and validate — ensure the repository is migration-ready
- Continuous sync — keep GitHub up to date while development continues
- Cutover — perform a final sync and transition GitHub to the system of record
During most of the process, Azure DevOps remains fully writable, so teams can keep working without interruption.
For detailed guidance, learn more here.
💬 Conclusion and key takeaways
Enterprise Live Migrations provides a practical path for organizations moving to GitHub Enterprise Cloud with data residency:
- Minimize disruption with continuous synchronization and a short cutover window
- Reduce risk by migrating without pausing active development
- Adopt flexibly with support for hybrid Azure DevOps and GitHub workflows
Announced half a year too late – we migrated hundreds of repos with our own tooling build around git-tfs. 🥹
Does ELM support migrating repositories from an on-premises Azure DevOps Server to GitHub?
That’s the third article about migrating from Azure DevOps to GitHub in the space of a week.
At what point will Microsoft be announcing the retirement of Azure DevOps??
I have the same question.
There has never been clarity around the future of the 2 tools. We were thinking about migrating an on-prem DevOps to the Cloud Version. Now what's next ?
Our devs do not want to use GitHub nor to be forced to use AI at any cost.
My 2 cents. Starts aligning both tools to all the features, bidirectionally. Then merge them.
Or be clear on what you want to do and your plans.
This seems only an internal war, where the customer is the last problem to think about.
this comment has been deleted.