Why Go?

Go (or Golang) is a relatively new programming language that is taking the software development world by storm. It was developed by Google to facilitate the construction of its backend software services. However, it's now being used by numerous enterprises and start-ups to write powerful applications. What sets Go apart is the fact that it was built from the ground up to provide performance that is destined to compete with very powerful languages, such as C/C++, while supporting a relatively simple syntax that resembles dynamic languages such as JavaScript. The Go runtime offers garbage collection; however, it does not rely on virtual machines to achieve that. Go programs are compiled into native machine code. When invoking the Go compiler, you simply choose the type of platform (Windows, Mac, and so on) that you'd like the binary to run on when you build. The compiler will then produce a single binary that works on that platform. This makes Go capable of cross-compiling and producing native binaries.

Go is perfect for microservice architectures, which we will be seeing a lot of in the future. A microservice architecture is an architecture where you pide the responsibilities of your application between smaller services that only focus on specific tasks. These services can then communicate among themselves to obtain the information they need to produce results.

Go is a fresh programming language, developed in the age of cloud computing, and with modern software technologies in mind. Go is optimized for portable microservice architectures due to the fact that a Go program mostly compiles to a single binary, making the need for dependencies and virtual machines in production environments almost non-existent. Go is also a pioneer in container technologies. Docker, the top name in software containers, is written in none other than Go. Due to Go's popularity, there is work being done by major cloud providers, as well as third-party contributors, to ensure that Go gets the API support it needs for different cloud platforms.

The goal of this book is to build the knowledge bridge between the Go programming language and the cloud technologies of modern computing. In this book, you will gain practical knowledge of Go microservice architectures, message queues, containers, cloud platform Go APIs, SaaS applications design, monitoring cloud applications, and more.