Cloud Native Go

Preface

It’s a magical time to be a technologist.

We have Docker to build containers, and Kubernetes to orchestrate them. Prometheus lets us monitor them. Consul lets us discover them. Jaeger lets us trace the relationships between them. These are just a few examples, but there are many, many more, all representative of a new generation of technologies: all of them are “cloud native,” and all of them are written in Go.

The term “cloud native” feels ambiguous and buzzwordy, but it actually has a pretty specific definition. According to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, a sub-foundation of the renowned Linux Foundation, a cloud native application is one that’s designed to be scalable in the face of a wildly changing load, resilient in the face of environmental uncertainty, and manageable in the face of ever-changing requirements. In other words, a cloud native application is built for life in a cruel, uncertain universe.

Incorporating lessons learned from years of building cloud-based software, Go was created about a decade ago as the first major language designed specifically for the development of cloud native software. This was largely because the common server languages in use at the time simply weren’t a great fit for writing the kinds of distributed, process-intensive applications that Google produces a lot of.

Since that time, Go has emerged as the lingua franca of cloud native development, being used in everything from Docker to Harbor, Kubernetes to Consul, InfluxDB ...