For organizations wanting to move from working with Azure DevOps Server to Azure DevOps Services, there is a high-fidelity migration service available. Every project collection that currently exists in the on-premises Azure DevOps Server environment can be migrated to an Azure DevOps organization using the Azure DevOps Server import service. All of the assets currently existing in the on-premises project collection will be migrated to Azure DevOps: work items, source control repositories, and build and release definitions.

The migration of a project collection consists of the following high-level steps:

1. Validating whether a project collection is ready for migration: This step does not make any changes, but only checks whether all preconditions for a migration have been met.
2. Preparing the migration: In this step, a JSON file is generated that describes how the migration should be performed. A second file can also be supplied for linking on-premises identity to AAD identities to ensure that all of the history is still correctly linked to who made the change after the migration.
3. A dry run of the migration is done to verify that the import process will result in the expected outcomes.
4. The actual migration: In this step, the collection is taken offline, a DACPAC is generated from the project collection database, the DACPAC and files from step two are uploaded, and the migration is initiated.
5. After the import, all assets need to be verified and, in specific scenarios, some post-import actions have to be taken.

For using the migration service, a comprehensive guide with checklists and step-by-step instructions is available and linked to at the end of this chapter.