Distributed Services with Go

Your Guide to Reliable, Scalable, and Maintainable Systems

Travis Jeffery

• Publisher: Pragmatic Bookshelf
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781680508383
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Software Development
• Index: Computer Science

Take your Go skills to the next level by learning how to design, develop, and deploy a distributed service. Start from the bare essentials of storage handling, work your way through networking a client and server, turn that single-node application into a distributed system with service discovery and consensus, and then deploy your service to the cloud. All this will make coding in your day job or side projects easier, faster, and more fun.

Create your own distributed services and contribute to open source projects. Build networked, secure clients and servers with gRPC. Gain insights into your systems and debug issues with observable services instrumented with metrics, logs, and traces. Operate your own Certificate Authority to authenticate internal web services with TLS. Automatically handle when nodes are added or removed to your cluster with service discovery. Coordinate distributed systems with replicated state machines powered by the Raft consensus algorithm. Lay out your applications and libraries to be modular and easy to maintain. Write CLIs to configure and run your applications. Run your distributed system locally and deploy to the cloud with Kubernetes. Test and benchmark your applications to ensure they're correct and fast.

Dive into writing Go and join the hundreds of thousands who are using it to build software for the real world.

Q&A with Travis Jeffery:

Q: What makes this book different?

A: This book walks the reader through building a real-world software project (a self-contained, persistent event-stream service) from start to finish. There isn't a book that walks through building a complete system like this in any language. This book introduces distributed systems practically, explaining the pieces that make up a distributed system and showing how they fit together.

Q: What will I take away after reading this book?

A: You'll learn how distributed systems work, and how to build your own distributed services, and how to contribute to others.

Q: How is the book structured?

A: The book has four parts:

- Getting Started: Persisting events in a log;

- Network: Building a single instance networked service;

- Distribute: Distributing that service as a cluster; and

- Deploy: Deploying that cluster.

In each chapter, you learn about a problem in distributed systems (for example: consensus, service discovery, load balancing) and you build a part of your service to solve that problem. By the end, you will have built and deployed a functioning event-streaming system.

Q: How experienced with Go should I be to follow this book?

A: This book focuses on teaching how to build distributed systems using Go, and not teaching Go itself. So you should know the language. However, I walk through building the whole project code snippet by code snippet and explain what's going on in each snippet. So if you don't know Go, you can work your way through the book if you're patient and use other resources to learn the syntax. I've also heard from people who've followed the book and implemented the equivalent code in other languages.

Table of contents

• Distributed Services with Go