Go Language Adoption and Tooling

4 posts · Jul 2012 – Jan 2016

What this trail covers

Cloudflare has fully embraced Go as a core language for its services, utilizing it for critical infrastructure components like DNS, SSL, and network compression. The company has developed and open-sourced various Go-based tools and libraries, including RRDNS for DNS infrastructure, Railgun for compression, Red October for cryptographic security, and SSL Bundler for certificate chain optimization. This adoption extends to experimentation with related technologies like CoreOS and Docker, and contributions to the Go language itself.

All Cloudflare trails

Jan 2016Go coverage with external testsThis post introduces a hack for obtaining test coverage data for end-to-end tests in Go. It involves creating a dummy test that executes the main function, compiling a binary with `go test -coverpkg="..." -c -tags testrunmain`, and then executing this binary with specific test flags to collect coverage information. It also mentions using `gocovmerge` to merge coverage profiles from unit and end-to-end tests.
Aug 2015Quick and dirty annotations for Go stack tracesThis post introduces a technique to improve the debuggability of Go stack traces in high-goroutine environments. It details how to convert IPv4 addresses to their uint32 representation and pass them as parameters (using the blank identifier '_') to goroutines. This allows for easier identification of listening IPs directly from stack traces, aiding in the debugging of systems like Cloudflare's RRDNS server.
Mar 2015A Go Gotcha: When Closures and Goroutines CollideThis post details a common pitfall in Go programming where closures used with goroutines can lead to unexpected behavior due to shared loop variables. It demonstrates how the loop variable `i` retains its final value (10) when accessed by goroutines after the loop has completed. The solution provided is to pass the loop variable as a parameter to the anonymous function that creates the goroutine, ensuring each goroutine receives its own copy of the variable's value at the time of its creation.
Nov 2013What we've been doing with GoThis post details Cloudflare's expanded use of Go, highlighting its production use for multiple services including DNS infrastructure, SSL, and compression. It introduces RRDNS, a Go-based DNS proxy with features like response rate limiting, caching, and load balancing, emphasizing Go's modularity, goroutines for isolation, defer for panic recovery, garbage collection, and concurrency primitives. Railgun, a Go-based compression technology for high-latency connections, is also discussed. Red October, a software-based encryption/decryption server for the two-man rule, and SSL Bundler, a tool for computing the fastest SSL certificate chains, are presented. The post also mentions ongoing experimentation with Go in CoreOS and Docker, internal load testing tools, and open-sourced Go libraries for stream processing, syslogging, and SPDY curling.
Nov 2012Do you want to work with Go?This post announces Cloudflare's adoption of Go for production systems, highlighting its importance for high-performance, highly-concurrent software. It mentions Go's package library as sufficient for writing small, fast programs quickly. The post lists current uses of Go, including PKI tools, Railgun, a new high-performance DNS server, and a curl-like tool for SPDY. It also mentions hosting the GoSF meetup and actively hiring Go developers.
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Jul 2012Go at CloudFlareThis post details the use of Go for the Railgun software, highlighting its suitability for highly concurrent systems. It showcases Go's concurrency features like goroutines and channels, its interface-based object orientation, and its extensive standard library. The post also mentions the benefit of Go generating single executable binaries.