Go kit

Go kit is a programming toolkit for building microservices (or elegant monoliths) in Go. We solve common problems in distributed systems and application architecture so you can focus on delivering business value.

Website: gokit.io
Mailing list: go-kit
Slack: gophers.slack.com #go-kit (invite)

Motivation

Go has emerged as the language of the server, but it remains underrepresented in so-called “modern enterprise” companies like Facebook, Twitter, Netflix, and SoundCloud. Many of these organizations have turned to 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, which provide a comprehensive, robust, and trustable way of building microservices for organizations of any size.

For more details, see the website, 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 (for now) — e.g. MPI, pub/sub, CQRS, etc.
Re-implementing functionality that can be provided by adapting existing software
Having opinions on operational concerns: deployment, configuration, process supervision, orchestration, etc.

Contributing

Please see CONTRIBUTING.md. Thank you, contributors!

Dependency management

Go kit is modules aware, and we encourage users to use the standard modules tooling. But Go kit is at major version 0, so it should be compatible with non-modules environments.

Code generators

There are several third-party tools that can generate Go kit code based on different starting assumptions.

Related projects

Projects with a ★ have had particular influence on Go kit’s design (or vice-versa).

Service frameworks

gizmo, a microservice toolkit from The New York Times ★
go-micro, a distributed systems development framework ★
gotalk, async peer communication protocol & library
Kite, a micro-service framework
gocircuit, dynamic cloud orchestration

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
sasbury/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

Architecting for the Cloud — Netflix
Dapper, a Large-Scale Distributed Systems Tracing Infrastructure — Google
Your Server as a Function (PDF) — Twitter