What this book covers

Chapter 1, Introduction to Microservices, looks at what makes the Go language suitable for building microservices and takes a look at the standard library that has all the components required to build a basic microservice. Looking at the standard elements first will give you a grounding and make you appreciate how some of the frameworks that we will discuss later can be incredibly useful.

Chapter 2, Designing a Great API, looks at what makes a good API. We will introduce both REST and RPC, explaining the differences between them. We will also examine the best practices for writing and versioning APIs.

Chapter 3, Introducing Docker, explains how you can wrap your application into a Docker image and how you can use Docker and Docker Compose as part of your development workflow. We will see how it is possible to build a small lightweight image for your application and some good practices for using Docker and writing Dockerfiles.

Chapter 4, Testing, will introduce the various techniques to ensure that your microservices are of the highest quality. We will look at unit testing, behavioral testing, and performance testing, providing you with practical advice and knowledge of the core testing frameworks.

Chapter 5, Common Patterns, introduces some of the standard patterns often employed in microservice architecture. We will take an in-depth look at load balancing, circuit breaking, service discovery, and the autopilot pattern to see what a Go-specific implementation for this would look like.

Chapter 6, Microservice Frameworks, builds on frameworks that implement many of the common features needed for a microservice. We will compare and contrast these through examples of their usage.

Chapter 7, Logging and Monitoring, examines essential techniques to ensure that your service is behaving correctly, and when it does not, ensures you have all the information at your disposal for successful diagnostics and debugging. We will look at using StatsD for simple metrics and timings, how to handle log file information, and approaches to logging more detailed data and platforms such as NewRelic, which provides a holistic overview of your service.

Chapter 8, Security, takes a look at authentication, authorization, and security for your microservice. We will look at JWT and how you can implement middleware for validating your requests and keeping things secure. We will also look at the bigger picture, looking at why you should implement TLS encryption and a principle of no trust between your services.

Chapter 9, Event-Driven Architecture, discusses that a common pattern to allow your microservices to collaborate using Events; you will learn about two of the most common eventing patterns and see how you can implement them in Go. We will also look at the introduction of Domain-Driven Design and how the use of a ubiquitous language can help your software development process.

Chapter 10, Continuous Delivery, discusses the concepts behind continuous delivery. We will then examine in detail a continuous delivery setup for one of the simple applications we created earlier in the book.