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Migrating Your Slack Workspace to the CNCF Cloud-Native Workspace

Overview​

The cloud-native workspace is owned and operated by the CNCF in partnership with the Linux Foundation and Salesforce. It offers the following benefits:

  • No cost to projects — operation is covered by an agreement between the Linux Foundation and Salesforce
  • Unlimited message history — workspace message history is not restricted by plan
  • Dedicated administration — handled by the CNCF Projects Team, reachable via #slack-admin-support, #slack-faq, and the CNCF Service Desk
  • Content moderation — inappropriate messages flagged by the "Report To Slack" mechanism are reported to the CNCF Projects Team for deletion
  • Community proximity — places your project and community at the heart of a community of cloud native projects, closer to CNCF staff

New members can join via communityinviter.com (also accessible at slack.cncf.io).

Channels of note​

ChannelPurpose
#maintainers-circleProject maintainers collaborate with each other and CNCF staff
#cncf-mentoringNew contributors participate in mentoring programs
#slack-faqTactical questions about the workspace
#slack-admin-supportAdministrative requests
note

CNCF does not mandate chat platforms — individual projects can choose their own communication tools. However, migrating to the cloud-native workspace is strongly encouraged and is part of the standard project onboarding process.

Migration planning​

You can migrate your project's workspace using the following plan, which includes both community and technical work.

Community work​

  1. Announce the migration — Let your community know that their workspace is being migrated to the CNCF's cloud-native workspace. Dates and times can be coordinated with your partner in the CNCF Projects Team.

  2. Set expectations — Let the members of your project workspace know that:

    • The CNCF Projects Team sends invitations to members who are not already in the cloud-native workspace.
    • Channel names in the new workspace use the project name as a prefix (for example, #general becomes #<project-name>-general).

Technical preparation​

Working with your CNCF Projects Team partner:

  1. Select channels — Decide which channels need to be migrated
  2. Rename channels — Ensure that those channel names are renamed on the source workspace to include a project prefix (this avoids name clashes with other CNCF projects in the cloud-native workspace)
  3. Export workspace data — Ask a workspace Owner to carry out a workspace export using Slack's built-in export functionality
  4. Import into cloud-native workspace — The CNCF Projects Team imports the exported data into the cloud-native workspace using Slack's native import mechanism

Optional: Backing up private channels and DMs​

info

This section is optional and applies only if project members want to preserve private channel history or direct messages before migration.

Slack's built-in workspace export only includes public channel history. Private channels and direct messages are not included in the standard export.

If project members wish to preserve private content before migration, the CNCF recommends using slackdump — a command-line tool that backs up data locally with no fees or third-party storage involved.

For detailed instructions, see the official CNCF guide: HOWTO Backup Private Channels and DMs from Slack

The backup guide also covers viewer tools for reviewing exported data (SlackLogViewer, Slackdump2Html, slack-export-viewer).