At its GitHub Universe event, GitHub today unveiled a bevy of updates to its cloud service, including a forthcoming set of migration tools. The tools will automate migrations from legacy continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) platform to GitHub Actions.

GitHub Actions Importer is already being used by a small group of enterprise IT organizations to migrate workflows and template the GitHub CI/CD platform.

Damian Brady, senior manager for developer advocacy at GitHub, told conference attendees that these free tools will become more broadly available in 2023. GitHub Actions Importer will be distributed as a Docker container that manifests itself as an extension of the GitHub command line interface (CLI).

One of the biggest challenges the company has faced in driving adoption of its platforms is that many DevOps teams don’t want to rebuild the templates and workflows they are already using on their existing CI/CD platform, he noted.

Other GitHub Actions extensions include native integration with software development tools for building internet-of-things (IoT) applications and support for personal access tokens (PATs) that enable more granular control over permissions and repository access.

Other security capabilities include expanded access to audit log events in the enterprise edition of GitHub, an ability for maintainers of open source repositories to privately share vulnerability reports and support for Ruby as one of the programming languages now supported by a CodeQL tool for discovering vulnerabilities.

Additional extensions to existing services for developers also were previewed, including an ability to interact with the GitHub Copilot tool for automating code writing using voice commands. Dubbed “Hey, GitHub!” the tool is available as an experiment being advanced by the GitHub Next research team.

Finally, the company previewed enhancements to code search-and-view capabilities in the Codespaces tool that will now be made available for free for up to 60 hours per month to developers.

GitHub claims its CI/CD platform is now being used to process 10 million builds a day, most of which are employing code accessed via its repository. It’s not clear how that compares to other CI/CD platforms, but it’s apparent the GitHub Actions CI/CD platform has gained a significant amount of traction as GitHub continues to make a case for creating tighter integrations between its repository and CI/CD platform. GitHub is also clearly signaling it will spend a lot more time wooing organizations that already have a legacy CI/CD platform installed.

In the meantime, the next era of DevOps has arrived as workloads become both more complex to build and deploy across highly distributed computing environments. Many of the CI/CD platforms that organizations deployed are now straining under the weight of multiple customizations and extensions that have been made over the years. Each DevOps teams will need to decide whether maintaining those platforms makes the most technical and economic sense or if they should migrate to a more modern platform.

Regardless of what they decide, one thing that is certain is that DevOps teams won’t be getting larger, so the need to invest in higher levels of automation has become pressing.