Ebook: Production Go. Build modern, production-ready web services in Go

If you are reading this book, we assume you are interested in running Go in a production environment. Maybe you dabble in Go on your side projects, but are wondering how you can use it at work. Or perhaps you’ve read a company blog post about converting their codebase to Go, which now has 3 times less code and response times one tenth of what they were before. Your mileage will vary when it comes to gains in productivity and efficiency, but we think they will be positive gains. Our goal in writing this book is to provide the knowledge to write a production-ready service in Go. This means not only writing the initial implementation, but also reliably deploying it, monitoring its performance, and iterating on improvements.

Go is a language that allows for fast iteration, which goes well with continuous deployment. Although Go is a statically typed language, it compiles quickly and can often be used as a replacement for scripting languages like Python. And many users report that when writing Go, once a program works, it continues to “just work”. We suspect that this is due to the simple design of the language, and the focus on readability rather than clever constructs.

In one project, we replaced existing APIs in PHP with equivalent functionality in Go. We saw performance improvements, including an order of magnitude reduction in response times, which led to both higher user retention and a reduction in server costs. We also saw developer happiness increase, because the safety guarantees in Go reduced the number of production-breaking bugs.

This book is not meant for beginner programmers. We expect our audience to be knowledgeable of basic computer science topics and software engineering practices. Over the years, we have helped ramp up countless engineers who had no prior experience writing Go. Ideally this will be the book that people recommend to engineers writing Go for the first time, and who want to better understand the “right way” to write Go.

We hope this book will help guide you on your journey to running Go in production. It will cover all important aspects of running a production system, including advanced topics like profiling the memory usage of a Go program, deploying and monitoring apps written in Go, and writing idiomatic tests.

Feel free to skip around to chapters that seem more relevant to your immediate concerns or interests. We will do our best to keep the chapters fairly independent of one another in order to make that possible.