Why You Should Write Your Next Microservice Using Golang

Golang and microservices development are popular trends in software development this year. In our previous article “Moving to microservices: top products & services“, we have already examined why many companies decided to use this architectural solution for their tech and business needs. Meanwhile, we also learned why a lot of programmers consider them to be unjustified and then disproved this statement in the article “Microservices please do“. Today we’ll see why Golang is a reliable choice for the development of microservices architecture.

The Advantages of Golang

Despite being a relatively new language (released in 2009 by Google), Golang has many advantages available to developers right out of the box. Programs written on Go can resist heavy loads that allow developers to build applications with loaded services. Golang is ideally suited to develop web applications and multiprocessor systems and integrates with GIT to manage distributed packages easily.

Golang has a simple and logical syntax which makes it easier to understand for other developers. If a developer has even a little experience with other programming languages, learning Go wouldn’t be a problem for him. When a program needs some improvements it won’t take a lot of time and additional

Why Write Microservices in Go

Microservices architecture has independent components, which implement business capabilities. A clear division by modules enables microservices architecture to receive the constant delivery of large and complicated applications. Since Golang development services is gained popularity, its use for the development of microservices is justified.

“As of today, applications use a number of external services: databases, caches, search and message queues. However, more and more specialists use microservices solutions due to its collection of separated components. While coding in Go, developers can use asynchronous Input, output (asynchronous I/O), so that an application can interact with any number of services without blocking web requests. “

— Vyacheslav Pinchuk, Golang developer at QArea 

Often, microservices development is adopted for scaling an application. Golang is perfectly suited for this purpose as well. It is based on C-family programming languages, so components written in Go will be easier to connect with components written in other languages from the same family.

Go is as much more efficient than C/C++, but it keeps the syntax of the code as simple as Ruby and Python. Compared to Swift, Go’s syntax is quite stable. From the first public release 1.0, in 2012, it didn’t change much. This makes it backward compatible, which is a great advantage among other programming languages. Microservices written in Go are also profitable when it comes to the business side of making software. It helps companies to save human resources and money.

Go’s Performance

Go differs from other programming languages with its fast performance and seamless operation. As a proof, it is the following benchmark, where Golang’s performance is much greater than the performance of Python or Java. It is just lower to C and C ++ languages, which makes it a competitive language for developing applications based on microservices. it possesses typical “microservice” workloads – serving HTTP/RPC and a garbage collector that also contributes to Golang’s performance.

Threads in Go also influence to its performance. They conceptually coincide with the processes using the same memory area. Threads exchange address area so to plan internal processes are easier. As a result, creating and switching between them are also quicker and smoother. Goroutines also play an important part in Go’s fast performance.

Switching between goroutines occurs only at precisely defined points, while many goroutines are multiplied into one stream of the operating system. This allows goroutines to create and cheaply switch between each other since there are a lot of them in one thread, not in different ones. In Golang any goroutine does not block others, therefore, there is no need for callbacks.

Conclusion

Golang differs from other languages by its young age and the possibility to develop interesting projects from the very beginning of its release.

Golang ensures high performance, like C/C ++, provides highly efficient concurrency processing like Java, and has clear readability like Python, Perl, and Erlang. Golang is designed to perform highly loaded systems, using the architecture of multiprocessor systems at 100 percent. For these reasons, many companies migrate to Go from other languages and design efficient software applying microservices architecture.

At QArea, we also use microservices to develop high-performance projects. Our product development department took all the best from this technology and created DueFocus management assistant which this year helped us received the 3rd level of CMMI appraisal. Contact us, we will be happy to help you in developing your own high-grade application using the best practices of Goland and microservices architecture.