go.dev/_content/solutions/google/firebase.md - website - Git at Google

 ---
 title: "How the Firebase Hosting Team Scaled With Go"
 layout: solution
 company: Firebase
 logoSrc: firebase.svg
 heroImgSrc: go_firebase_case_study.png
 series: Case Studies
 quote: |
   Firebase is Google’s mobile platform that helps you quickly develop high-quality
   apps and grow your business.

   The Firebase Hosting team shared their journey with Go, including their
   backend migration from Node.js, the ease of onboarding new Go developers, and
   how Go has helped them scale.
 ---

 The Firebase Hosting team provides static web hosting services for Google Cloud
 customers. They provide a static web host that sits behind a global content
 delivery network, and offer users tools that are easy to use. The team also
 develops features that range from uploading site files to registering domains to
 tracking usage.

 Before joining Google, Firebase Hosting’s tech stack was written in Node.js. The
 team started to use Go when they needed to interoperate with several other
 Google services. They decided to use Go to help them scale easily and
 efficiently, knowing that “concurrency would continue to be a big need.” They
 “were confident Go would be more performant,” and “liked that Go is more terse”
 than other languages they were considering, said Michael Bleigh, a software
 engineer on the team.

 Starting with one small service written in Go, the team migrated their entire
 backend in a series of moves. The team progressively identified large features
 they wanted to implement and, in the process, rewrote them in Go and moved to
 Google Cloud and Google’s internal cluster management system. **Now the Firebase
 Hosting team has replaced 100% of backend Node.js code with Go.**

 The team’s experience writing in Go began with one engineer. “Through
 peer-to-peer learning and Go being generally easy to get started with, everyone
 on the team now has Go dev experience,” said Bleigh. They’ve found that while a
 majority of people who are new to the team haven’t had any experience with Go,
 “most of them are productive within a couple weeks.”

 "Using Go, it's easy to see how the code is organized and what the code does,"
 said Bleigh, speaking for the team. “Go is generally very readable and
 understandable. The language’s error handling, receivers, and interfaces are all
 easy to understand due to the idioms in the language.”

 Concurrency continues to be a focus for the team as they scale. Robert Rossney,
 a software engineer, shared that “Go makes it very easy to put all of the hard
 concurrency stuff in one place, and everywhere else it's abstracted.” Rossney
 also spoke to the benefits of using a language built with concurrency in mind,
 saying that “there are also a lot of ways to do concurrency in Go. We’ve had to
 learn when each route is best, how to determine when a problem is a concurrency
 problem, how to debug–but that comes out of the fact that you actually can write
 these patterns in Go code.”

 {{backgroundquote `
   author: Robert Rossney
   title: Software Engineer
   quote: |
     Generally speaking, there’s not a time on the team where we’re feeling
     frustrated with Go, it just kind of gets out of the way and lets you do work.
 `}}

 Hundreds of thousands of customers host their websites with Firebase Hosting,
 which means Go code is used to serve billions of requests per day. “Our customer
 base and traffic have doubled multiple times since migrating to Go without ever
 requiring fine-tuned optimizations” shared Bleigh.  With Go, the team has seen
 performance improvements both in the software and on the team, with excellent
 productivity gains. “Generally speaking,” Rossney mentioned, “...there’s not a
 time on the team where we’re feeling frustrated with Go, it just kind of gets
 out of the way and lets you do work.”

 In addition to the Firebase Hosting team, engineering teams across Google have
 adopted Go in their development process. Read about how the [Core Data
 Solutions](/solutions/google/coredata/) and [Chrome](/solutions/google/chrome/)
 teams use Go to build fast, reliable, and efficient software at scale.
	---
	title: "How the Firebase Hosting Team Scaled With Go"
	layout: solution
	company: Firebase
	logoSrc: firebase.svg
	heroImgSrc: go_firebase_case_study.png
	series: Case Studies
	quote: \|
	Firebase is Google’s mobile platform that helps you quickly develop high-quality
	apps and grow your business.

	The Firebase Hosting team shared their journey with Go, including their
	backend migration from Node.js, the ease of onboarding new Go developers, and
	how Go has helped them scale.
	---

	The Firebase Hosting team provides static web hosting services for Google Cloud
	customers. They provide a static web host that sits behind a global content
	delivery network, and offer users tools that are easy to use. The team also
	develops features that range from uploading site files to registering domains to
	tracking usage.

	Before joining Google, Firebase Hosting’s tech stack was written in Node.js. The
	team started to use Go when they needed to interoperate with several other
	Google services. They decided to use Go to help them scale easily and
	efficiently, knowing that “concurrency would continue to be a big need.” They
	“were confident Go would be more performant,” and “liked that Go is more terse”
	than other languages they were considering, said Michael Bleigh, a software
	engineer on the team.

	Starting with one small service written in Go, the team migrated their entire
	backend in a series of moves. The team progressively identified large features
	they wanted to implement and, in the process, rewrote them in Go and moved to
	Google Cloud and Google’s internal cluster management system. **Now the Firebase
	Hosting team has replaced 100% of backend Node.js code with Go.**

	The team’s experience writing in Go began with one engineer. “Through
	peer-to-peer learning and Go being generally easy to get started with, everyone
	on the team now has Go dev experience,” said Bleigh. They’ve found that while a
	majority of people who are new to the team haven’t had any experience with Go,
	“most of them are productive within a couple weeks.”

	"Using Go, it's easy to see how the code is organized and what the code does,"
	said Bleigh, speaking for the team. “Go is generally very readable and
	understandable. The language’s error handling, receivers, and interfaces are all
	easy to understand due to the idioms in the language.”

	Concurrency continues to be a focus for the team as they scale. Robert Rossney,
	a software engineer, shared that “Go makes it very easy to put all of the hard
	concurrency stuff in one place, and everywhere else it's abstracted.” Rossney
	also spoke to the benefits of using a language built with concurrency in mind,
	saying that “there are also a lot of ways to do concurrency in Go. We’ve had to
	learn when each route is best, how to determine when a problem is a concurrency
	problem, how to debug–but that comes out of the fact that you actually can write
	these patterns in Go code.”

	{{backgroundquote `
	author: Robert Rossney
	title: Software Engineer
	quote: \|
	Generally speaking, there’s not a time on the team where we’re feeling
	frustrated with Go, it just kind of gets out of the way and lets you do work.
	`}}

	Hundreds of thousands of customers host their websites with Firebase Hosting,
	which means Go code is used to serve billions of requests per day. “Our customer
	base and traffic have doubled multiple times since migrating to Go without ever
	requiring fine-tuned optimizations” shared Bleigh. With Go, the team has seen
	performance improvements both in the software and on the team, with excellent
	productivity gains. “Generally speaking,” Rossney mentioned, “...there’s not a
	time on the team where we’re feeling frustrated with Go, it just kind of gets
	out of the way and lets you do work.”

	In addition to the Firebase Hosting team, engineering teams across Google have
	adopted Go in their development process. Read about how the [Core Data
	Solutions](/solutions/google/coredata/) and [Chrome](/solutions/google/chrome/)
	teams use Go to build fast, reliable, and efficient software at scale.