Google Workspace - Google counterpart to Microsoft Azure DevOps?

Hello team, I have a question about Google Workspace.

Currently we are using Microsoft “Azure DevOps” (formerly Team Foundation Server) to manage our own developments. We use the tool as a Git server, for task management, documentation, automated testing and pipelines. Is there a counterpart in the Google world? It makes sense if it is compatible with Firebase. Or does Google rely on “third party providers”?

Thanks in advance.

I asked our Google Workspace team about this and got the following (long) answer:

Azure DevOps is a collective term for various tools, so I have to unravel it a bit first. But of course, most of the functionalities are available here and there. For Google, however, Google Workspace and GCP are conceptually different.

· Google Workspace is an office solution as a service. While it also comes with its own scripting and can talk transparently to the larger cloud platform, Google Workspace is primarily designed for office work.

The Google Cloud Platform (GCP), on the other hand, is the accumulation of all infrastructure that Google provides for developers and admins. Please see here on this page.

· The important things for most use cases that don’t fall under Analytics or AI are the categories Compute, Storage/Database, and Networking.

· Together, the two represent the Google Cloud brand. What makes it a bit confusing is that Google Workspace runs technically on the same systems as you can buy it in the context of GCP.

That said… The services you should be interested in are mostly located in GCP. Those should be mentioned in this context:

· Cloud Source Repos. Basically git aaS from Google. This has the big advantage that it is the easiest to build in cloud build - and to use cool features of other platforms you can also create a repo as a mirror, e.g. from a github or bitbucket repo (both public and private).

· In addition (if you like) there are also integrations into error reporting, logging (Stackdriver), and tracing - so that you can also debug or single-step cloud applications (if required and after appropriate configuration). See also Cloud Code.
· Cloud Build. CI/CD pipeline in the Google Cloud. This can be triggered at various events, and tests, builds, and/or deployments can be initiated. These are extremely powerful, because you can use almost any Docker Container as a stage (and Google builds some of the most useful ones as Cloud builders).

But we would like to paint a very honest picture:

· Task management works halfway okay with Google Workspace, but it is not specialized in it. GCP has no project management tool. For example, if you want to do code reviews (pull requests) or task tracking (ticket system), Google’s answer is that there is software out there that is good enough that it’s not worth building competition for Google right now. Github, or the combo Bitbucket + Jira, are much more experienced and simply really good tools (if you can handle them).

· Documentation is also a Use Case, which GCP does not consider with an additional tool. If you want to write more documentation than READMEs and comments in the code or in your APIs, for example user documentation, then here is also the answer that another tool might fit better As a knowledge base I would think of Confluence for example, or to write and publish tutorials you might use Docs or Sites depending on the use case.

While you can do almost anything in GCP, there are APIs for the either small or especially Google Workspace related use cases. Google offers APIs for pretty much everything. However, it is rarely as easy, incredibly fast and lightweight to get results as with Google’s Apps Script.

A little tip on that: There is a super-practical tool to manage this code called google/clasp. With it, you can write TypeScript instead of JavaScript, or just version your code in a repo instead of Drive.

Last but not least, because you might not always have that on your screen, but it is quite close to your heart: Basically Google has a very strong commitment to open source. Both in the products, they often give back to the community and in their services, where they take great care to minimize vendor lock-in.



Please find more information about Google Workspace in general on this page.