go-zero (listed in CNCF Landscape: https://landscape.cncf.io/?selected=go-zero) is a web and RPC framework with many built-in engineering practices. It was born to ensure the stability of the busy services with resilience design and has been serving sites with tens of millions of users for years.

go-zero contains simple API description syntax and a code generation tool called goctl. You can generate Go, iOS, Android, Kotlin, Dart, TypeScript, and JavaScript from .api files with goctl.

Advantages of the Golang microservice framework go-zero:

• improve the stability of the services with tens of millions of daily active users
• builtin middlewares also can be integrated into your frameworks
• simple API syntax, one command to generate a couple of different languages
• auto validate the request parameters from clients
• plenty of builtin microservice management and concurrent toolkits
• builtin chained timeout control, concurrency control, rate limit, adaptive circuit breaker, adaptive load shedding, even no configuration needed

1. Backgrounds of the Golang Microservice Framework go-zero

At the beginning of 2018, we decided to re-design our system, from monolithic architecture with Java+MongoDB to microservice architecture. After research and comparison, we chose to:

• Golang based
  • great performance
  • simple syntax
  • proven engineering efficiency
  • extreme deployment experience
  • less server resource consumption
• Self-designed microservice architecture
  • I have rich experience in designing microservice architectures
  • easy to locate the problems
  • easy to extend the features

2. The Golang implementation and features of go-zero

go-zero is a web and RPC framework that integrates lots of engineering practices. The features are mainly listed below:

• powerful tool included less code to write
• simple interfaces
• fully compatible with net/http
• middlewares are supported, easy to extend
• failure-oriented programming, resilience design
• builtin service discovery, load balancing
• builtin concurrency control, adaptive circuit breaker, adaptive load shedding, auto-trigger, auto recover
• auto validation of API request parameters
• high performance
• chained timeout control
• auto management of data caching
• call tracing, metrics, and monitoring
• high concurrency protected

3. Design considerations of the Go Framework go-zero

By designing the microservice architecture, we expected to ensure stability and productivity. And from just the beginning, we have the following design principles:

• keep it simple
• high availability
• easy to extend
• resilience design, failure-oriented programming
• try best to be friendly to the business logic development, encapsulate the complexity
• one thing, one way
• stable on high concurrency

After almost half a year, we finished the transfer from a monolithic system to microservice system and deployed on August 2018. The new system guaranteed business growth and system stability.