New Case Studies About Google’s Use of Go

Go started in September 2007 when Robert Griesemer, Ken Thompson, and I began discussing a new language to address the engineering challenges we and our colleagues at Google were facing in our daily work. The software we were writing was typically a networked server—a single program interacting with hundreds of other servers—and over its lifetime thousands of programmers might be involved in writing and maintaining it. But the existing languages we were using didn't seem to offer the right tools to solve the problems we faced in this complex environment.

So, we sat down one afternoon and started talking about a different approach.

When we first released Go to the public in November 2009, we didn’t know if the language would be widely adopted or if it might influence future languages. Looking back from 2020, Go has succeeded in both ways: it is widely used both inside and outside Google, and its approaches to network concurrency and software engineering have had a noticeable effect on other languages and their tools.

Go has turned out to have a much broader reach than we had ever expected. Its growth in the industry has been phenomenal, and it has powered many projects at Google.

Credit to Renee French for the gopher illustration.

The earliest production uses of Go inside Google appeared in 2011, the year we launched Go on App Engine and started serving YouTube database traffic with Vitess. At the time, Vitess’s authors told us that Go was exactly the combination of easy network programming, efficient execution, and speedy development that they needed, and that if not for Go, they likely wouldn’t have been able to build the system at all.

The next year, Go replaced Sawzall for Google’s search quality analysis. And of course, Go also powered Google’s development and launch of Kubernetes in 2014.

In the past year, we’ve posted sixteen case studies from end users around the world talking about how they use Go to build fast, reliable, and efficient software at scale. Today, we are adding three new case studies from teams inside Google:

• Core Data Solutions: Google’s Core Data team replaced a monolithic indexing pipeline written in C++ with a more flexible system of microservices, the majority of them written in Go, that help support Google Search.
• Google Chrome: Mobile users of Google Chrome in lite mode rely on the Chrome Optimization Guide server to deliver hints for optimizing page loads of well-known sites in their geographic area. That server, written in Go, helps deliver faster page loads and lowered data usage to millions of users daily.
• Firebase: Google Cloud customers turn to Firebase as their mobile and web hosting platform of choice. After joining Google, the team completely migrated its backend servers from Node.js to Go, for the easy concurrency and efficient execution.

We hope these stories provide the Go developer community with deeper insight into the reasons why teams at Google choose Go, what they use Go for, and the different paths teams took to those decisions.

If you’d like to share your own story about how your team or organization uses Go, please contact us.

By Rob Pike, Distinguished Engineer

Recapping major improvements in Go 1.15 and bringing the Go community together

The Latest Version of Go is Released

In August, the Go team released Go 1.15, marking another milestone of continuous improvements to the language. As always, many of the updates were supported by our community of contributors in collaboration with the engineering team here at Google.

Following our earlier release in February, the latest Go build brings a slew of performance improvements. We’ve made significant changes behind the scenes to the compiler, reducing binary sizes by about 5%, and improving building Go applications to be around 20% faster and requiring 30% less memory on average.

Go 1.15 also includes several updates to the core library, a few security improvements, and much more–you can dive into the full release notes here. We’re really excited to see how developers like you, ranging from those working on indie projects all the way to enterprise devs, will incorporate these updates into your projects.

A few users have been working with the release candidates ahead of the latest build and were kind enough to share their experience.

Wayne Ashley Berry, a Senior Engineer at Over, shared that “...seeing significant performance improvements in the new releases is incredible!” and, speaking of compiler improvements, showed “one of [their] services compiling ~1.3x faster” after upgrading to Go 1.15.

This mirrored our experience within Google, compiling larger Go applications like Kubernetes which experienced 30% memory reductions and 20% faster builds.

These are just a couple examples of how some users have already seen the benefits of Go 1.15. We’re looking forward to what the rest of the gopher community will do with it!

A Better Experience For Go Developers

Over the last few months we’ve also been hard at work improving a few things in the Go ecosystem. In July, the VS Code extension for Go officially joined the Go project and more recently, we rolled out a few updates for our online resources.

We brought a few important changes to pkg.go.dev, a central source of information for Go packages and modules. With these changes came functional improvements to make the browsing experience better and minor tweaks across the site (including a cute new gopher). We also made some changes to go.dev—our hub for Go developers—making it easier to navigate the site and find examples of Go’s use in the enterprise.

The new home page on pkg.go.dev. Credit to Renee French for the gopher illustration.

We’ll be bringing even more improvements to the Go ecosystem in the coming months, so stay tuned!

Our Commitment to Open Source and Google Open Source Live

Most of these changes wouldn’t be possible without contribution from our open source community through submitting CLs to our release process, organizing community meetups, and engaging in discussions about future changes (like generics).

Being part of the open source community is something that the Go team embraces, and Google as a whole works to support every year. It’s through this community that we’re able to iterate on our work with a constant feedback loop and bring new gophers into the Go ecosystem. We’re lucky to have the support of passionate Go advocates, and even get to celebrate the occasional community gopher design!

That being said, this has been a challenging year to gather in person for meetups or larger conferences. However, the gopher community has been incredibly resilient, with many meetups taking place virtually, several of which Go team members have been able to attend.

We’d like to help the entire open source community stay connected. In that vein, we’re excited to announce that Google will host a series of free virtual events, Google Open Source Live, every month through next year! As part of the series, on November 7th, members of the Go team will be sharing community updates, some things we’ve been up to, and a few best practices around getting started with Go.

Visit the official site for the Go Day on Google Open Source Live, to learn more about registration and speakers. To keep up-to-date with the Go team, make sure to follow the official Go twitter and visit go.dev, our hub for Go developers.

By Steve Francia – Product Lead, Go Team

Google Open Source Live: A monthly connection for open source communities

Starting in September, open source experts at Google will have a new place to meet with you online: Google Open Source Live, a virtual event series to connect with open source communities with a focus on different technologies and areas of expertise. Google Open Source Live launches on September 3, 2020, and will provide monthly content for open source developers at all levels, contributors, and community members. 

The inaugural event of this series will be: The new open source: Leadership, contributions and sustainability, in which the Google Open Source Programs Office, together with Developer Relations specialists, will share an overview of the best ways to get involved and succeed in the open source ecosystem with four exciting sessions.

Given how the 2020 pandemic has affected the communities’s ability to stay engaged and connect, it is important to us to stay present in the ecosystem. Therefore, we made a conscious decision to build an event series for developers to have the opportunity to hear directly from the Google Open Source Programs Office, developer advocates and experts. Each day will provide impactful information in a 2-hour time frame.

Attendee Experience

After attending several virtual events throughout the Summer, we designed our platform with one idea in mind: to create an alternative platform for developers to gather, learn, and interact with experts, and have fun.

Attendees can interact with the experts and speakers with Live Q&A chat during the sessions, and join an after party following the event! It’ll provide a great interactive opportunity for activities and to connect with others.

Sept. 3 Agenda

“The New Open Source: Leadership, contributions and sustainability”
9 AM - 11 AM PST

Session	Topic	Speaker
Hosted by Stephen Fluin, DevRel Lead and Dustin Ingram, Developer Advocate.
1	"Be the leader you want in OSS"	Megan Byrd-Sanicki Manager, Operations & Research
2	"5 simple things you can do to improve OSS docs"	Erin McKean, Docs Advocacy Program Manager, OSPO
3	Fireside Chat: "Business models and contributor engagement in OS"	Seth Vargo, Developer Advocate Kaslin Fields, Developer Advocate
4	"Sustainability in OS"	Megan Byrd-Sanicki, Manager  Operations & Research

Google Open Source Live Event Calendar

Each month will focus on one open source project or concept and feature several speakers who are subject matter experts in their fields. Events take place monthly on the first Thursday.

 

2020
Sep 3	Oct 1	Nov 5	Dec 3
The new open source: Leadership, contributions and sustainability	Knative day On Google Open Source Live