Actuating Google Production: How Google's Site Reliability Engineering Team Uses Go

Google runs a small number of very large services. Those services are powered by a global infrastructure covering everything a developer needs: storage systems, load balancers, network, logging, monitoring, and much more. Nevertheless, it is not a static system-it cannot be.

Go's readability and simplicity help improve development culture. One of the things developers dislike is understanding and modifying code written by others, but this burden is reduced.

It is no coincidence that open source projects written in Go have more PRs than open source projects written in other languages ​​that perform the same function. Zookeeper and etcd have similar functions, but etcd quickly achieved stability through community contributions. In the case of C++ projects without Bazel, it is often impossible to contribute because the build settings are blocked.

In a microservice structure, when trying to create a large function, you may need to contribute to the services of other teams. At this time, whether the code you see for the first time is something you don't understand at first glance or code you can understand if you put your mind to it, affects the mental model of developers. Easy-to-understand code reduces dependency in collaboration, encourages work to be done proactively, and further provides self-efficacy.

It doesn’t necessarily have to be Go. Code that is easy to read, code that behaves as expected, and code that shows the implementer's intent in tests. This is the first step in reducing the complexity of the development organization, and Go meets this goal.

"For example, Annealing impacts a wide variety of teams and services meaning that we relied heavily on contributions across the company. The simplicity of Go made it possible for people outside our team to see why some part or another was not working for them, and often provide fixes or features themselves. This allowed us to quickly grow."