External services can open themselves to Git and GitHub in two ways. First, they can just use remote repositories to allow you to create a repository on their platform. Secondly, many services avail themselves of GitHubs APIs to integrate themselves more deeply into GitHub. The services outlined below are just some of the many potentially useful services you might find. It does pay off to spend a little time researching if there is a particular need you have. We have already touched on one popular service, ZenHub, here are a few more.

Figshare

Figshare is a popular commerical repository used by many researchers to archive and share their work. It has a pretty easy integration into GitHub. Just go to your application settings (after you have an account), and connect to GitHub. Then on the My data tab click on the GitHub icon to import the repository of choice. See the full documentation for more detail.

Open Science Framework

The Open Science Framework(OSF) is an open source and free service for managing, archiving and sharing your work. You can connect it to a variety of services including GitHub. Others include Box, DropBox, and Amazon S3.

Amazon Web Services

Amazon Web Services(AWS) provides an array of services. Some of these integrate GitHub via remote. Others integrate more closely using their APIs. If you are working on larger and collaborative projects, AWS may be a useful tool. Some of the services that work well with GitHub are Cloud9, Code Pipeline and Code Deploy.

Travis CI

Travis CI is a popular tool among software developers and included here as an example of the many services that might be useful for more software intensive projects. It is an Continuous Integration service that takes automated tests written for software and runs them whenever certain types of activity are detected in a GitHub repository. It is a great way to ensure your code is always functioning. It is often used with pull requests, only permitting them to be merged if the continuous integration tests pass.