Book Image

Distributed Computing with Go

By : V.N. Nikhil Anurag
Book Image

Distributed Computing with Go

By: V.N. Nikhil Anurag

Overview of this book

Distributed Computing with Go gives developers with a good idea how basic Go development works the tools to fulfill the true potential of Golang development in a world of concurrent web and cloud applications. Nikhil starts out by setting up a professional Go development environment. Then you’ll learn the basic concepts and practices of Golang concurrent and parallel development. You’ll find out in the new few chapters how to balance resources and data with REST and standard web approaches while keeping concurrency in mind. Most Go applications these days will run in a data center or on the cloud, which is a condition upon which the next chapter depends. There, you’ll expand your skills considerably by writing a distributed document indexing system during the next two chapters. This system has to balance a large corpus of documents with considerable analytical demands. Another use case is the way in which a web application written in Go can be consciously redesigned to take distributed features into account. The chapter is rather interesting for Go developers who have to migrate existing Go applications to computationally and memory-intensive environments. The final chapter relates to the rather onerous task of testing parallel and distributed applications, something that is not usually taught in standard computer science curricula.
Table of Contents (11 chapters)

Controlling parallelism

We know that spawned goroutines will start executing as soon as possible and in a simultaneous fashion. However, there is an inherent risk involved when the said goroutines need to work on a common source that has a lower limit on the number of simultaneous tasks it can handle. This might cause the common source to significantly slow down or in some cases even fail. As you might guess, this is not a new problem in the field of computer science, and there are many ways to handle it. As we shall see throughout the chapter, Go provides mechanisms to control parallelism in a simple and intuitive fashion. Let's start by looking at an example to simulate the problem of burdened common source, and then proceed to solve it.

Imagine a cashier who has to process orders, but has a limit to process only 10 orders in a day. Let's look at how to present this...