Go kit

Go kit is a distributed programming toolkit for building microservices in large organizations. We solve common problems in distributed systems, so you can focus on your business logic.

• 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 large, consumer-focused tech companies like Facebook, Twitter, Netflix, and SoundCloud. These organizations have largely adopted 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 a library, designed to be imported into a binary package. Vendoring is currently the best way for binary package authors to ensure reliable, reproducible builds. Therefore, we strongly recommend our users use vendoring for all of their dependencies, including Go kit. To avoid compatibility and availability issues, Go kit doesn't vendor its own dependencies, and doesn't recommend use of third-party import proxies.

There are several tools which make vendoring easier, including gb, glide, gvt, govendor, and vendetta. In addition, Go kit uses a variety of continuous integration providers to find and fix compatibility problems as soon as they occur.

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 ★
• h2, a microservices 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

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

Additional reading

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