Google’s Go is one of the fastest growing programming languages on the planet. But Google is now bidding to make it the go-to language for cloud development. Go Cloud, a new library that features a set of tools to support cloud development, has been revealed in a blog post published yesterday. “With this project,” the team explains, “we aim to make Go the language of choice for developers building portable cloud applications.”
Why Go Cloud now?
Google developed Go Cloud because of a demand for a way of writing, simpler applications that aren’t so tightly coupled to a single cloud provider.
The team did considerable research into the key challenges and use cases in the Go community to arrive at Go Cloud. They found that the increased demand for multi-cloud or hybrid cloud solutions wasn’t being fully leveraged by engineering teams, as there is a trade off between improving portability and shipping updates. Essentially, the need to decouple applications was being pushed back by the day-to-day pressures of delivering new features.
With Go Cloud, developers will be able to solve this problem and develop portable cloud solutions that aren’t tied to one cloud provider.
What’s inside Go Cloud?
Go Cloud is a library that consists of a range of APIs. The team has “identified common services used by cloud applications and have created generic APIs to work across cloud providers.” These APIs include:
- Blob storage
- MySQL database access
- Runtime configuration
- A HTTP server configured with request logging, tracing, and health checking
At the moment Go Cloud is compatible with Google Cloud Platform and AWS, but say they plan “to add support for additional cloud providers very soon.”
Try Go Cloud for yourself
If you want to see how Go Cloud works, you can try it out for yourself – this tutorial on GitHub is a good place to start. You can also stay up to date with news about the project by joining Google’s dedicated mailing list.
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