A standard library for microservices.

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)

Sponsors

• OrderMyGear

Click on Sponsor, above, for more information on sponsorship.

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.

• devimteam/microgen
• GrantZheng/kit
• kujtimiihoxha/kit (unmaintained)
• nytimes/marvin
• sagikazarmark/mga
• sagikazarmark/protoc-gen-kit
• tuneinc/truss

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 microservices client/server library ★
• 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

• Gorilla
• Gin
• Negroni
• Goji
• Martini
• Beego
• Revel (considered harmful)
• GoBuffalo

Additional reading

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