At The New York Times, our development teams have been adopting the Go programming language over the last three years to build better back-end services. In the past I’ve written about using Go for Elastic MapReduce streaming. I’ve also talked about using Go at GothamGo for news analysis and to improve our email and alert systems at the Golang NYC Meetup. We use Go for a wide variety of tasks, but the most common use throughout the company is for building JSON APIs.
When we first began building APIs with Go, we didn’t use any frameworks or shared interfaces. This meant that they varied from team to team and project to project with regard to structure, naming conventions and third-party tools. As we started building more and more APIs, the pains of microservices started to become apparent.
Around the time we reached this point, I came across Peter Bourgon’s talk from FOSDEM 2015, “Go and the Modern Enterprise,” and its accompanying blog post. A lot of what Peter said hit close to home for me and seemed very relevant to our situation at The Times. His description of the “Modern Enterprise” fit our technology teams quite well. We’re a consumer-focused company whose engineering group has more than doubled in size to a few hundred heads in recent years, and we have had a service-oriented architecture for a long time. We have also run into the same problems he brought up. As the need for more and more microservices arose, we needed a common set of tools to orchestrate and monitor them, as well as a common set of patterns and interfaces that enable developers to concentrate on business problems. An RFC for a new toolkit named “Go Kit” came out of the talk, and eventually open source development of it was under way.
Peter’s talk and the concept of Go Kit made me very excited but also somewhat dismayed. I knew a lot of the RPC and tracing technology involved would likely take a long time to be adopted throughout the company without some stepping stones to get us there. We also didn’t have a whole lot of time to wait around for the toolkit to be completed, so we decided to build our own set of tools that could bridge the gap and hopefully complement Go Kit by implementingsome of its “non-goals.”
It’s my pleasure to announce that as of today our toolkit, Gizmo, is open source. Gizmo offers four packages to help developers quickly configure and build microservice APIs and pubsub daemons.
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