Google Inc.’s cloud ambitions aren’t limited to its own infrastructure-as-a-service platform.

The company this morning released Cloud Composer, a service that enables administrators to create workflows for automating their firms’ technology environments. It works not only with Google’s platform but also those of competitors such as Amazon Web Services Inc. Moreover, the offering can integrate with the tools with which an enterprise manages its on-premises hardware.

Cloud Composer is not the first service that Google has created to target companies using competing platforms. The offering was preceded by Stackdriver, a tool for monitoring the health of applications that can likewise be set up in AWS deployments.

Cloud Composer serves a much different but complementary role. It’s based on an open-source project called Apache Airflow that makes it possible to automate common infrastructure operations using the Python programming language. Administrators can define how the system should approach a given task, as well as lay out what steps should be taken out in case something breaks. 

Google claims that having a centralized hub for managing such workflows can provide multiple benefits. One is that enabling operations teams to become more organized, which isn’t a given seeing how companies often rely on a hodgepodge of tools and custom scripts for automation. Allowing everyone to be on the same page removes the risk of a user accidentally breaking something by, say, making a change that conflicts with a script they didn’t know was running.

Another benefit that Google promises with Cloud Composer is usability. The service has a relatively simple learning curve thanks to the features carried over from Apache Airflow, which the search giant says allows users of “any experience level” to write and deploy workflows.

Google’s strategy of developing services with cross-platform appeal could give it a much-needed competitive edge. But although its cloud business is growing fast, the search giant remains a distant third to AWS and Microsoft Corp.’s Azure, a gap that will take a lot of more work to narrow.

Cloud Composer is available now in beta test.

Image: Google