How We Went from 30 Servers to 2: Go

Why would NodeJS be the most obvious alternative to Go? The two seem more dissimilar than similar.

Interesting to hear of Go being used in production. It'd be great to hear some more details on your setup when deploying the go processes - how are you managing failover, what's your load balancer, and how are you handling swapping out processes etc? Are you compiling on the server or local machines before deployment? Most other languages have lots of solutions on the deployment side now but Go is so new there isn't much info out there.

Also, as you are running an API presumably your app in Rails was pretty simple, did you have the impression things would be more complex in Go if you were writing an app with an extensive front end and UI and using sql? I'd miss all the view helpers etc available at present I think. Going from 30 servers to 2 certainly sounds like a huge improvement, so it was definitely worth it for you, are you thinking of writing any front-end apps in Go?

I've been playing around with Go recently and it is a fantastic language for someone coming from dynamic languages like Ruby. I particularly liked interfaces as a way to define a contract for implementations to follow, and the simple package system which encourages you to make your code modular.

Hah, nice photo! Are you ok with that? Found it on google images.

It would be interesting to hear some of the reasons you went with Go vs Clojure (and also the other languages you mentioned)

> "We also weren't sure if we would be able hire top talent if we chose Go, but we soon found out that we could get top talent because we chose Go."

I feel[1] that a smart/talented C/C++/anything developer can go from someone who has never seen or heard of golang to a proficient and productive Go developer in a matter of a few weeks, maybe even _days_, if not less.

That's how long it takes to go through the following materials (and fav some for later reference) and play with the language a bit.

http://golang.org/ref/spec

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytEkHepK08c

http://commandcenter.blogspot.com.au/2012/06/less-is-exponen...

http://tour.golang.org/

http://golang.org/doc/install

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XCsL89YtqCs

http://golang.org/doc/code.html

http://golang.org/doc/effective_go.html

http://golang.org/pkg/ - use as reference

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6kdp27TYZs

http://talks.golang.org/2012/splash.article

https://gobyexample.com/

http://golang-examples.tumblr.com/

And a some more similar things that you can mostly get to from golang.org site. The beauty of how concise the language and even its website are, is that you can literally just go through everything there one thing after another.

[1] This is my personal opinion based on playing with go the last few weeks/months. I'd love to verify this theory. It's not yet the primary language in which I do things in (I use C++11 atm), but for all my side tasks[2] it proved to be indispensable. And I found it very easy to pick up. I can't wait until I start doing all my work in Go, that will be a true test of its productivity efficiency.

[2] https://gist.github.com/shurcooL