Note : This is part four of a series of posts describing how to write “Production Grade Webservices in Go”. Here’s Part - 1, The Service , Part - 2, The Store , Part - 3, Transports. In part-3, we built a working HTTP service that passed the tests. But we’re still lacking the option to actually “run” it. While, this may appear like a trivial task, it’s actually quite important to get this right. Read more

Note : This is part three of a series of posts describing how to write “Production Grade Webservices in Go”. Here’s Part - 1, The Service and Part - 2 The Store if you haven’t read those. We’ve reached a point where we have properly laid out the business logic and the storage implementation for our service. Now, we’re going to move on and talk about transports. As the name suggests, a transport is essentially transporting data over the network in a pre-defined format. Read more

Note : This is part two of a series of posts describing how to write “Production Grade Webservice in Go”. Here’s Part - 1, The Service if you haven’t read it. The previous post ended with a defined structured for our service and some basic testing. It was, however, lacking what is a very important component for most webservices, a datastore. If you’ve used frameworks to write services in the past, you’re probably familiar with abstractions like Hibernate/DjangoORM etc. Read more

Production Grade is a term thrown around a lot these days. Every organization seems to have it’s own definition for what qualifies as “Production Grade” or “Production Ready”. In these series of posts, I’m going to present my take on the topic and the bare minimum of what I think qualifies under this definition. These posts assume a working knowledge of Go and are not meant for total beginners to the language. Read more

So, I’ve recently had to work with the Azure-SDK for a few small tasks. I’ve worked with AWS and GCP SDKs before, and while they have their problems it wasn’t too hard to figure them out. Azure wasn’t quite the same. Now, I am new to Azure, but I did not expect to spend 30 minutes to get a simple VM listing to work. The Authentication docs seemed fairly straight forward. Read more

I’ve always been a big fan of Caddy, and it just got a 2.0 release! In the meantime, I have developed another throwaway service called Archy, and naturally, it deserves the best Ops can offer. So, here’s the scenario. I need a simple HTTPS service exposed to the world. I have a VPS with a public IP. Of course, I’ll celebrate Caddy’s 2nd birth and write a simple Caddyfile. archy.tux-sudo.com reverse_proxy /* 127. Read more

Code Coverage, Static Code Analysis, Tests, Releases? What else? Probably a few more things, but you get the point. These are all things that are expected to be part of a modern day development workflow. While this is becoming the norm in companies, a lot of pet open-source projects still skimp on these things. And frankly, I did too. I wasn’t going to bother hosting my own Jenkins behemoth just so my soon-to-be abandoned project could run a few builds. Read more

One thing has always bothered me while writing tests is the lack of a real datasource to run tests against. Most projects I’ve worked with in the past have either mocked responses from a datastore or used a “common” datastore to perform tests against. While mocks are good for quick unit tests, I still prefer using a “real” datasource, especially for integration tests. While taking Bill Kennedy’s Ultimate Go training a while ago, I saw Bill recommend a testing approach which involved “spinning up” a database container right from within your test code, run your tests, and clean-up. Read more

So then, here is the deal. I write tiny microservices that may or may not serve any purpose. Despite how meaningless they might be, I give them the perfect operations treatment. Read more

This one is a gamechanger. It really is. On a recent Golang obsessed Github browsing spree, I read the following project description: “Fast, cross-platform HTTP/2 web server with automatic HTTPS”. I’ve read that before, and more often than not ended up disappointing myself and resorting to hacks like [this] (https://blog.tux-sudo.com/posts/letsencrypt-nginx-docker/) to create an automatic TLS system for my websites. There are other ways, but almost all of them were semi-automatic in the long run (yay cron! Read more