Golang is a general-purpose programming language released in 2009, inheriting all the nice features of C like language while discarding what its creators see as disadvantages.

Being a compiled language, it provides a high performance for applications developed which only increases with its concurrency capabilities of utilizing all the cores of processes at the same time for running processes.

Along with them, its other base features provide a built-in support for Microservice application development. But before going through how Golang empowers the development of applications with Microservice architecture, let us briefly discuss what it is in the first place.

What is the Microservice Architecture?

Instead of the usual way of organizing the software in terms of hierarchical layers, Microservice architecture organizes the entire software application with a series of “microservices” which are independent software chunks that are controlled by a central UI which invokes each service based on the need. Microservice applications have been increasing in popularity for many years in many domains due to its many advantages. 

For one thing, development of scalable and flexible applications becomes a lot simpler and also, failure of any part of the system will not trigger a massive collapse of all the system.

In theory, one can select and work with a number of programming languages for development of microservice applications because of obvious reasons. However, in practice, it is better to choose and stick to a particular programming stack in the development time so as to not raise new performance issues. High performance, Support for continuous integration, independent deployment, decentralization of various components are some of the features to look into a language when selecting for Microservice applications.

Using Go for Microservices:

Just like Spring Boot, Spark, Restlet in Java and Flask, Bottle, CherryPy in Python, Go has specific frameworks that would make development of Microservice applications much more easy and manageable.

Some of the popular ones are:

GoMicro:

It is one of the most popular RPC frameworks which is pluggable and has an automatic service discovery that registers services automatically. It supports both the asynchronous and also the synchronous communication modes and provides load balancing which is critical in balancing requests between different instances of the services.

GoMicro has three layers and they are: Service absorption, Client server model and the plugins.

Go Kit:

It is a programming toolkit that helps in building microservices. This can be imported as a binary package and provides you with many packages for different operations like Authentication, Transport, Logging, tracing, Service discovery and more.

Gizmo:

This is also a microservice toolkit and is provided by New York Times. Gazebo helps to put the server and pubsub deamson through different packages. With Gizmo, the packages exposed are related to Server, PubSub, Config and Web.

Conclusion

Microservice architecture is a great way for developing software applications that are highly scalable and flexible. Go lang has great built in features and different frameworks of GoMicro, GoKit, Gizmo which provide great help for developing Microservice applications!