Creating Microservices in Go

Introduction

The book "Building Microservices with Go" (Nic Jackson, 2017) is a practical guide to designing and implementing microservice architecture in the Go language. Despite the book being published several years ago, its approaches and tools (Docker, gRPC, testing) remain relevant. The author is an experienced engineer who worked at the Financial Times and other large companies, which gives the material practical value.

What the book is about

The book covers the full cycle of creating a microservice application: from design to deployment. Main topics:

• Microservice architecture and its difference from a monolith
• API design (REST, gRPC)
• Containerization with Docker and orchestration
• Testing (unit, integration, end-to-end)
• Logging, monitoring, and error handling
• Security and authentication
• CI/CD and cloud deployment

Who this book is for

The book is aimed at intermediate Go developers who are already familiar with the basics of the language and want to move on to building distributed systems. It will also be useful for DevOps engineers who want to understand the internal workings of microservices in Go.

What the reader will learn

• How to break a monolithic application into microservices
• How to design reliable REST and gRPC APIs
• How to use Docker for packaging services
• How to write tests for microservices (including mocks and contracts)
• How to set up centralized logging (ELK)
• How to implement Service Discovery and load balancing
• How to ensure security via JWT and OAuth2
• How to automate build and deployment using CI/CD

Strengths

• Practical focus: each chapter contains code examples that can be applied immediately
• Emphasis on testing: a whole chapter is dedicated to microservice testing strategies
• Modern tools: Docker, gRPC, Consul, Prometheus — everything needed in real-world development
• Clear style: the author explains complex concepts in simple language
• End-to-end example: a real application (a booking system) is built from start to finish

Who it is recommended for

The book will be useful for:

• Go developers who want to master microservices
• Architects looking for a practical guide
• DevOps specialists working with Go projects
• Anyone who wants to understand how to build scalable systems in Go

Despite its age, the book remains an excellent starting point for learning microservices in Go. We recommend it as a supplement to more recent sources.