Scalable Microservices with Go

When building systems that need to handle millions of concurrent connections, Go (Golang) is often the language of choice. Its lightweight goroutines and robust standard library make it ideal for cloud-native microservices.

Why Go?

Unlike Java or Node.js, Go compiles to a single static binary. This means tiny container images and lightning-fast startup times—crucial for serverless environments and auto-scaling Kubernetes clusters.

Concurrency Patterns

Go's concurrency model is based on CSP (Communicating Sequential Processes). Instead of sharing memory and using locks (which leads to race conditions), goroutines communicate via `channels`. This makes writing thread-safe code significantly easier.

gRPC vs REST

For internal service-to-service communication, we almost exclusively use gRPC. It uses Protocol Buffers for binary serialization (smaller payloads) and HTTP/2 for multiplexing. The result is a dramatic reduction in latency compared to traditional JSON/REST APIs.