Go kit
Go kit is a distributed programming toolkit for microservices in the
modern enterprise. We want to make Go a viable choice for application
(business-logic) software in large organizations.
Motivation
Go has emerged as the language of the server, but it remains underrepresented
in large, consumer-focused tech companies like Facebook, Twitter, Netflix, and
SoundCloud. These organizations have largely adopted JVM-based stacks for
their business logic, owing in large part to libraries and ecosystems that
directly support their microservice architectures.
To reach its next level of success, Go needs more than simple primitives and
idioms. It needs a comprehensive toolkit, for coherent distributed programming
in the large. Go kit is a set of packages and best practices, leveraging years
of production experience, and providing a comprehensive, robust, and trustable
platform for organizations of any size.
In short, Go kit brings Go to the modern enterprise.
For more details, see
the motivating blog post and
the video of the talk.
See also the
Go kit talk at GopherCon 2015.
Goals
- Operate in a heterogeneous SOA — expect to interact with mostly non-Go-kit services
- RPC as the primary messaging pattern
- Pluggable serialization and transport — not just JSON over HTTP
- Operate within existing infrastructures — no mandates for specific tools or technologies
Non-goals
- Supporting messaging patterns other than RPC (in the initial release) — MPI, pub/sub, CQRS, etc.
- Re-implementing functionality that can be provided by wrapping existing packages
- Having opinions on deployment, orchestration, process supervision, etc.
- Having opinions on configuration passing — flags, env vars, files, etc.
Component status
Dependency management
Users who import Go kit into their package main
are responsible to organize
and maintain all of their dependencies to ensure code compatibility and build
reproducibility. Go kit makes no direct use of dependency management tools like
Godep.
We will use a variety of continuous integration providers to find and fix
compatibility problems as soon as they occur.
Contributing
Please see CONTRIBUTING.md. Thank you, contributors!
API stability policy
The Go kit project depends on code maintained by others.
This includes the Go standard library and sub-repositories and other external libraries.
The Go language and standard library provide stability guarantees, but the other external libraries typically do not.
The API Stability RFC
proposes a standard policy for package authors to advertise API stability.
The Go kit project prefers to depend on code that abides the API stability policy.
Projects with a ★ have had particular influence on Go kit's design.
Service frameworks
- go-micro, a microservices client/server library ★
- gocircuit, dynamic cloud orchestration
- gotalk, async peer communication protocol & library
- Kite, a micro-service framework
Individual components
- afex/hystrix-go, client-side latency and fault tolerance library
- armon/go-metrics, library for exporting performance and runtime metrics to external metrics systems
- codahale/lunk, structured logging in the style of Google's Dapper or Twitter's Zipkin
- eapache/go-resiliency, resiliency patterns
- FogCreek/logging, a tagged style of logging
- grpc/grpc-go, HTTP/2 based RPC
- inconshreveable/log15, simple, powerful logging for Go ★
- mailgun/vulcand, programmatic load balancer backed by etcd
- mattheath/phosphor, distributed system tracing
- pivotal-golang/lager, an opinionated logging library
- rubyist/circuitbreaker, circuit breaker library
- Sirupsen/logrus, structured, pluggable logging for Go ★
- sourcegraph/appdash, application tracing system based on Google's Dapper
- spacemonkeygo/monitor, data collection, monitoring, instrumentation, and Zipkin client library
- streadway/handy, net/http handler filters
- vitess/rpcplus, package rpc + context.Context
- gdamore/mangos, nanomsg implementation in pure Go
Web frameworks
Additional reading