This is the book for Gophers who want to learn how to build distributed systems. You know the basics of Go and are eager to put your knowledge to work. Build distributed services that are highly available, resilient, and scalable. This book is just what you need to apply Go to real-world situations. Level up your engineering skills today.
 

Take your Go skills to the next level by learning how to design, develop, and deploy a distributed service. Start from the bare essentials of storage handling, then work your way through networking a client and server, and finally to distributing server instances, deployment, and testing. All this will make coding in your day job or side projects easier, faster, and more fun.
 

Create your own distributed services and contribute to open source projects. Build networked, secure clients and servers with gRPC. Gain insights into your systems and debug issues with observable services instrumented with metrics, logs, and traces. Operate your own Certificate Authority to authenticate internal web services with TLS. Automatically handle when nodes are added or removed to your cluster with service discovery. Coordinate distributed systems with replicated state machines powered by the Raft consensus algorithm. Lay out your applications and libraries to be modular and easy to maintain. Write CLIs to configure and run your applications. Run your distributed system locally and deploy to the cloud with Kubernetes. Test and benchmark your applications to ensure they're correct and fast.
 

Dive into writing Go and join the hundreds of thousands who are using it to build software for the real world.

What You Need:

Go 1.13+ and Kubernetes 1.16+

Who This Book Is For

This book is for intermediate to advanced developers who want to learn how to build distributed services. I’ve geared the book toward Go programmers, and prior Go experience will help, but you don’t have to be an expert. This book shows you how to build distributed services, and the concepts are the same regardless of what language you use. So if you’re writing distributed services in Go, you can take full advantage of this book; if not, you can apply the ideas I present here in any language.
 

We will design, develop, and deploy a distributed service to explore what Go can do. We’ll develop and deploy the service in layers: from the bare essentials of storage handling, to the networking of a client and server, to distributing server instances, deployment, and testing. I divided this book into four parts that parallel those layers.
 

•  Part I: Get Started: We’ll begin with the basic elements: building our project’s storage layer and defining its data structures.

•  Part II: Network: This part is where we’ll make our service work over a network.

•  Part III: Distribute: In this part we’ll make our service distributed—highly available, resilient, and scalable.

•  Part IV: Deploy: Here’s where we’ll deploy our service and make it live.

Review

"Having built most of the technologies in this book without the benefit of this book,I can wholeheartedly recommend Distributed Services with Go. Travis deliversyears of practical experience distilled into a clear and concise guide that takesthe reader step by step from foundational knowledge to production deployment.This book earns my most hearty endorsement."
―Brian Ketelsen, Principal Developer Advocate, Microsoft; and Organizer, GopherCon

"In this practical, engaging book, Travis Jeffery shines a light on the path tobuilding distributed systems. Read it, learn from it, and get coding!"
―Jay Kreps, CEO, Confluent, Inc., and Co-Creator of Apache Kafka
"Travis Jeffery distills the traditionally academic topic of distributed systems downto a series of practical steps to get you up and running. The book focuses on thereal-world concepts used every day by practicing software engineers. It's a greatread for intermediate developers getting into distributed systems or for seniorengineers looking to expand their understanding." 
―Ben Johnson, Author of BoltDB

"For any aspiring Gopher, Travis provides a gentle introduction to complex topicsin distributed systems and provides a hands-on approach to applying the concepts."―Armon Dadgar, HashiCorp Co-Founder

From the Author

Q&A with Travis Jeffery:

Q: What makes this book different?

A: This book walks the reader through building a real-world software project (a self-contained, persistent event-stream service) from start to finish. There isn't a book that walks through building a complete system like this in any language. This book introduces distributed systems practically, explaining the pieces that make up a distributed system and showing how they fit together.

Q: What will I take away after reading this book?

A: You'll learn how distributed systems work, and how to build your own distributed services, and how to contribute to others.

Q: How is the book structured?

A: The book has four parts:
•   Getting Started: Persisting events in a log;
•   Network: Building a single instance networked service;
•   Distribute: Distributing that service as a cluster; and
•   Deploy: Deploying that cluster.

In each chapter, you learn about a problem in distributed systems (for example: consensus, service discovery, load balancing) and you build a part of your service to solve that problem. By the end, you will have built and deployed a functioning event-streaming system.

Q: How experienced with Go should I be to follow this book?

A: This book focuses on teaching how to build distributed systems using Go, and not teaching Go itself. So you should know the language. However, I walk through building the whole project code snippet by code snippet and explain what's going on in each snippet. So if you don't know Go, you can work your way through the book if you're patient and use other resources to learn the syntax. I've also heard from people who've followed the book and implemented the equivalent code in other languages.

About the Author

Travis Jeffery is a Canadian software maker and writer. He's created software since 2001; hacked on open source projects like Jocko, Timecop, Mocha; and built several startups from the ground up, including Segment and Confluent.