Building Microservice in Golang

Microservice architecture is a popular software design pattern that involves dividing a large application into smaller, independent services that can be developed, deployed, and scaled autonomously. Each microservice is responsible for a specific function within the larger application and communicates with other services via well-defined interfaces, often leveraging lightweight communication protocols such as REST or message queues.

Advantages of Microservice Architecture

Microservice architecture provides several advantages. Here are some benefits of using microservices:

• Maintainability: Smaller services are more manageable and easier to understand, leading to more stable and reliable applications.
• Technology Diversity: Microservices can be built using different technologies, providing greater flexibility and innovation in the development process.
• Scalability: Microservices can be scaled independently of each other, making it easier to allocate resources based on demand
• Flexibility: Microservices can be developed and deployed independently, allowing for more agile development processes and faster time-to-market
• Resilience: Microservices are independent of each other; failures in one service do not necessarily affect other services.
• Complexity: Microservices can introduce additional complexity in managing and coordinating interactions between services, and it can be more challenging to test and debug a distributed system. 

Disadvantages of Microservice Architecture

Microservice architecture has its own set of challenges and drawbacks, which include:

• Complexity: The complexity increases as the number of microservices increases, making it harder to manage and coordinate interactions between services.
• Skilled developers: Working with microservices architecture requires skilled developers who can identify the microservices and manage their inter-communications effectively.
• Deployment: The independent deployment of microservices can be complicated, requiring additional coordination and management.
• Network usage: Microservices can be costly in terms of network usage as they need to interact with each other, resulting in network latency and increased traffic.
• Security: Microservices may be less secure than monolithic applications due to the inter-services communication over the network, which can be vulnerable to security breaches.
• Debugging: Debugging can be difficult as control flows over multiple microservices, and identifying where and why an error occurred can be a challenging task.

Difference Between Monolithic and Microservice Architecture

Monolithic architecture refers to a traditional approach where an entire application is built as a single, unified system, with all the functions tightly coupled together. In this approach, changes to one part of the application can have a ripple effect on other parts, making it difficult to scale and maintain over time. In addition, monolithic architecture is typically deployed as a single, large application, and it can be difficult to add new features or make changes to the system without affecting the entire application.

In contrast, microservice architecture is a more modern approach where an application is broken down into smaller, independent services that can be developed, deployed, and scaled independently of each other. Each microservice focuses on a specific function within the larger application, and communication between services is typically accomplished through lightweight communication protocols such as REST or message queues. This approach offers more flexibility and scalability, as changes to one microservice do not necessarily affect the other microservices.

Why Golang for Microservices?

Go, also known as Golang, is an ideal language for developing microservices due to its unique characteristics. Here are some reasons why you consider Go for building microservices:

• Performance: Go is a fast and efficient language, which makes it perfect for building microservices that need to handle high volumes of traffic and requests. It also provides excellent runtime performance.

Source: Benchmarks Game

• Concurrency: Go provides built-in support for concurrency, which allows it to handle multiple requests simultaneously, making it a great choice for building scalable microservices.
• Small footprint: Go binaries have a small footprint and are lightweight, which makes it easier to deploy and manage microservices in a containerized environment.
• Simple and readable syntax: Go has a simple and intuitive syntax that is easy to learn and read. This makes it a great language for building maintainable microservices that are easy to understand and modify.
• Strong standard library: Go has a strong standard library that provides many useful built-in functions and packages for building microservices, such as networking, serialization, and logging.
• Large community: Go has a large and active community that provides support, resources, and third-party libraries for building microservices. 
• Cross-platform support: Go is designed to be cross-platform, which means that you can build and deploy microservices on a variety of operating systems and environments.

Overall, Go is an excellent choice for building microservices that require high performance, scalability, and efficiency. Its simple syntax, strong standard library, and large community make it a popular choice among developers for building microservices, and its small footprint and cross-platform support make it easy to deploy and manage microservices in a containerized environment.

Golang Frameworks

Here are a few frameworks build in Golang:

• Go Micro – Go Micro is an open-source platform designed for API-driven development. It is also the most popular remote procedure call (RPC) framework today. It provides load balancing, synchronous and asynchronous communication, message encoding, service discovery, and RPC client/server packages.

• Go Kit – Go Kit is a library that fills the gaps left by the standard library and provides solutions for most operational and infrastructure concerns. It makes Go a first-class language for writing microservices in any organization. 

 These frameworks provide a variety of features and functionalities that can help developers build and manage microservices more efficiently. Choosing the right framework will depend on the specific requirements of the project and the expertise of the development team.

Why Do Companies Use Golang?

Two main reasons why Google's programming language is used by companies of various tiers:

1. Designed for multi-core processing: Golang was specifically designed for cloud computing and takes advantage of modern hardware's parallelism and concurrency capabilities. Golang's goroutines and channel-based approach make it easy to utilize all available CPU cores and handle parallel I/O without adding complexity to development.
2. Built for big projects: Golang's code is simple and easy to read, making it ideal for large-scale projects. 

Real-Life Examples of Using Go to Build Microservices

Here are some real-life examples of companies using Go to build microservices:

Netflix: Netflix uses Go for several of its microservices, including its platform engineering and cloud orchestration services. Go's performance and concurrency features help Netflix handle the scale and complexity of its infrastructure.

Docker: Docker is a popular containerization platform that uses Go to power many of its core components, including the Docker daemon and Docker CLI. Go's small footprint, and cross-platform support make it well-suited for building containerized applications.

Conclusion

Microservices have become a popular choice for startups and large companies due to their scalability, sustainability, and ability to deploy them independently. Among programming languages, Go stands out as an excellent choice for microservices. Its easy-to-write code, high level of security, fast execution speed, and low entry threshold make it unmatched for this architecture. Go's performance, concurrency, and simplicity make it an increasingly popular option for building scalable and reliable microservices architectures.