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title: “Go for Cloud & Network Services” linkTitle: “Cloud & Network Services” description: “With a strong ecosystem of tools and APIs on major cloud providers, it is easier than ever to build services with Go.” date: 2019-10-04T15:26:31-04:00 series: Use Cases icon: file: cloud-green.svg alt: cloud icon iconDark: file: cloud-white.svg alt: cloud icon

Overview {#overview .sectionHeading}

{{quote author: Ruchi Malik title: developer at Choozle link: https://builtin.com/software-engineering-perspectives/golang-advantages quote: | Go makes it very easy to scale as a company. This is very important because, as our engineering team grows, each service can be managed by a different unit.}}

Key Benefits {#key-benefits .sectionHeading}

Address tradeoff between development cycle time and server performance

Go was created to address exactly these concurrency needs for scaled applications, microservices, and cloud development. In fact, over 75 percent of projects in the Cloud Native Computing Foundation are written in Go.

Go helps reduce the need to make this tradeoff, with its fast build times that enable iterative development, lower memory and CPU utilization. Servers built with Go experience instant start up times and are cheaper to run in pay-as-you-go and serverless deployments.

Address challenges with the modern cloud, delivering standard idiomatic APIs

Go addresses many challenges developers face with the modern cloud, delivering standard idiomatic APIs, and built in concurrency to take advantage of multicore processors. Go’s low-latency and “no knob” tuning make Go a great balance between performance and productivity - granting engineering teams the power to choose and the power to move.

Use Case {#use-case .sectionHeading}

Use Go for Cloud Computing

Go's strengths shine when it comes to building services. Its speed and built-in support for concurrency results in fast and efficient services, while static typing, robust tooling, and emphasis on simplicity and readability help build reliable and maintainable code.

Go has a strong ecosystem supporting service development. The standard library includes packages for common needs like HTTP servers and clients, JSON/XML parsing, SQL databases, and a range of security/encryption functionality, while the Go runtime includes tools for race detection, benchmarking/profiling, code generation, and static code analysis.

The major Cloud providers (GCP, AWS, Azure) have Go APIs for their services, and popular open source libraries provide support for API tooling (Swagger), transport (protocol buffers, gRPC), monitoring (OpenCensus), Object-Relational Mapping (gORM), and authentication (JWT). The open source community has also provided several service frameworks, including Go Kit, Go Micro, and Gizmo, which can be a great way to get started quickly.

Go tools for Cloud Computing

{{toolsblurbs `

• title: Docker url: https://www.docker.com/ iconSrc: /images/logos/docker.svg paragraphs:
  • Docker is a platform-as-a-service that delivers software in containers. Containers bundle software, libraries, and config files, are hosted by a Docker Engine, and are run by a single operating-system kernel (utilizing less system resources than virtual machines).
  • Cloud developers use Docker to manage their Go code and support multiple platforms, as Docker supports the development workflow and deployment process.
• title: Kubernetes url: https://kubernetes.io/ iconSrc: /images/logos/kubernetes.svg paragraphs:
  • Kubernetes is an open-source container-orchestration system, written in Go, for automating web app deployment. Web apps are often built using containers (as noted above) packaged with their dependencies and configurations. Kubernetes helps deploying and managing those containers at scale. Cloud programmers use Kubernetes to build, deliver, and scale containerized apps quickly—managing the growing complexity via APIs that controls how the containers will run. `}}

{{projects `

• company: Google url: http://cloud.google.com/go logoSrc: google-cloud.svg logoSrcDark: google-cloud.svg desc: Google Cloud uses Go across its ecosystem of products and tools, including Kubernetes, gVisor, Knative, Istio, and Anthos. Go is fully supported on Google Cloud across all APIs and runtimes. ctas:
  • text: Go on Google Cloud Platform url: http://cloud.google.com/go
• company: Capital One url: https://www.capitalone.com/ logoSrc: capitalone_light.svg logoSrcDark: capitalone_dark.svg desc: Capital One uses Go to power the Credit Offers API, a critical service. The engineering team is also building their serverless architecture with Go, citing Go’s speed and simplicity, and mentioning that “[they] didn’t want to go serverless without Go.” ctas:
  • text: Credit Offers API url: https://medium.com/capital-one-tech/a-serverless-and-go-journey-credit-offers-api-74ef1f9fde7f
• company: Dropbox url: https://www.dropbox.com/ logoSrc: dropbox.svg logoSrcDark: dropbox.svg desc: Dropbox was built on Python, but in 2013 decided to migrate their performance-critical backends to Go. Today, most of the company’s infrastructure is written in Go. ctas:
  • text: Dropbox libraries url: https://blogs.dropbox.com/tech/2014/07/open-sourcing-our-go-libraries/
• company: Mercado Libre url: https://www.mercadolibre.com.ar/ logoSrc: mercadolibre_light.svg logoSrcDark: mercadolibre_dark.svg desc: MercadoLibre uses Go to scale its eCommerce platform. Go produces efficient code that readily scales as MercadoLibre’s online commerce grows. Go improves their productivity while streamlining and expanding MercadoLibre services. ctas:
  • text: MercadoLibre & Go url: http://go.dev/solutions/mercadolibre
• company: The New York Times url: https://www.nytimes.com/ logoSrc: the-new-york-times-icon.svg logoSrcDark: the-new-york-times-icon.svg desc: The New York Times adopted Go “to build better back-end services”. As the usage of Go expanded with in the company they felt the need to create a toolkit to “to help developers quickly configure and build microservice APIs and pubsub daemons”, which they have open sourced. ctas:
  • text: NYTimes - Gizmo url: https://open.nytimes.com/introducing-gizmo-aa7ea463b208
  • text: Gizmo GitHub url: https://github.com/nytimes/gizmo
• company: Twitch url: https://www.twitch.tv/ logoSrc: twitch.svg logoSrcDark: twitch.svg desc: Twitch uses Go to power many of its busiest systems that serve live video and chat to millions of users. ctas:
  • text: Go’s march to low-latency GC url: https://blog.twitch.tv/en/2016/07/05/gos-march-to-low-latency-gc-a6fa96f06eb7/
• company: Uber url: https://www.uber.com/ logoSrc: uber_light.svg logoSrcDark: uber_dark.svg desc: Uber uses Go to power several of its critical services that impact the experience of millions of drivers and passengers around the world. From their real-time analytics engine, AresDB, to their microservice for Geo-querying, Geofence, and their resource scheduler, Peloton. ctas:
  • text: AresDB url: https://eng.uber.com/aresdb/
  • text: Geofence url: https://eng.uber.com/go-geofence/
  • text: Peloton url: https://eng.uber.com/open-sourcing-peloton/ `}}

Get Started {#get-started .sectionHeading}

Go books for cloud computing

{{books `

• title: Building Microservices with Go url: https://www.amazon.com/Building-Microservices-Go-efficient-microservices/dp/1786468662/ thumbnail: /images/books/building-microservices-with-go.jpg
• title: Hands-On Software Architecture with Golang url: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1788622596/ref=cm_sw_r_tw_dp_U_x_-aZWDbS8PD7R4 thumbnail: /images/books/hands-on-software-architecture-with-golang.jpg
• title: Building RESTful Web services with Go url: https://www.amazon.com/Building-RESTful-Web-services-gracefully-ebook/dp/B072QB8KL1 thumbnail: /images/books/building-restful-web-services-with-go.jpg
• title: Mastering Go Web Services url: https://www.amazon.com/Mastering-Web-Services-Nathan-Kozyra-ebook/dp/B00W5GUKL6 thumbnail: /images/books/mastering-go-web-services.jpg `}}

{{libraries `

• title: Web frameworks viewMoreUrl: https://pkg.go.dev/search?q=web+framework items:
  • text: Buffalo url: https://gobuffalo.io/en/ desc: A framework for rapid web development in Go, curating Go and JS libraries together.
  • text: Echo url: https://echo.labstack.com/ desc: A high performance, extensible, and minimalist Go web framework
  • text: Flamingo url: https://www.flamingo.me/ desc: A fast open-source framework based on Go with clean and scalable architecture
  • text: Gin url: https://gin-gonic.com/ desc: A web framework written in Go, with a martini-like API.
  • text: Gorilla url: http://www.gorillatoolkit.org/ desc: A web toolkit for the Go programming language.
• title: Routers viewMoreUrl: https://pkg.go.dev/search?q=http%20router items:
  • text: julienschmidt/httprouter url: https://pkg.go.dev/github.com/julienschmidt/httprouter?tab=overview desc: A lightweight high performance HTTP request router
  • text: gorilla/mux url: https://pkg.go.dev/github.com/gorilla/mux?tab=overview desc: A powerful HTTP router and URL matcher for building Go web servers with 🦍
  • text: Chi url: https://pkg.go.dev/github.com/go-chi/chi?tab=overview desc: A lightweight, idiomatic and composable router for building Go HTTP services.
  • text: net/http url: https://pkg.go.dev/net/http desc: A standard library HTTP package
• title: Template Engines viewMoreUrl: https://pkg.go.dev/search?q=templates items:
  • text: html/template url: https://pkg.go.dev/html/template desc: A standard library HTML template engine
  • text: flosch/pongo2 url: https://pkg.go.dev/github.com/flosch/pongo2?tab=overview desc: A Django-syntax like templating-language
• title: Databases & Drivers viewMoreUrl: https://pkg.go.dev/search?q=database%20OR%20sql items:
  • text: database/sql url: https://pkg.go.dev/database/sql desc: A standard library interface with driver support for MySQL, Postgres, Oracle, MS SQL, BigQuery and most SQL databases
  • text: mongo-driver/mongo url: https://pkg.go.dev/go.mongodb.org/mongo-driver/mongo?tab=overview desc: The MongoDB supported driver for Go
  • text: olivere/elastic url: https://pkg.go.dev/github.com/olivere/elastic?tab=overview desc: A Elasticsearch client for Go
  • text: GORM url: https://gorm.io/ desc: An ORM library for Go
  • text: Bleve url: http://blevesearch.com/ desc: Full-text search and indexing for Go
  • text: CockroachDB url: https://www.cockroachlabs.com/ desc: An evolution of the database—architected for the cloud to deliver resilient, consistent, distributed SQL at scale
• title: Web Libraries viewMoreUrl: https://pkg.go.dev/search?q=web items:
  • text: markbates/goth url: https://pkg.go.dev/github.com/markbates/goth?tab=overview desc: Authentication for web apps
  • text: jinzhu/gorm url: https://pkg.go.dev/github.com/jinzhu/gorm?tab=overview desc: An ORM library for Go
  • text: dgrijalva/jwt-go url: https://pkg.go.dev/github.com/dgrijalva/jwt-go?tab=overview desc: A Go implementation of json web tokens
• title: Other Projects items:
  • text: gopherjs url: https://pkg.go.dev/github.com/gopherjs/gopherjs?tab=overview desc: A compiler from Go to JavaScript allowing developers to write front-end code in Go which will run in all browsers. `}}