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)

Concurrency and parallelism

Computer and software programs are useful because they do a lot of laborious work very fast and can also do multiple things at once. We want our programs to be able to do multiple things simultaneously, that is, multitask, and the success of a programming language can depend on how easy it is to write and understand multitasking programs.

Concurrency and parallelism are two terms that we are bound to come across often when looking into multitasking and they are often used interchangeably. However, they mean two distinctly different things.

The standard definitions given on the Go blog (https://blog.golang.org/concurrency-is-not-parallelism) are as follows:

  • Concurrency: Concurrency is about dealing with lots of things at once. This means that we manage to get multiple things done at once in a given period of time. However, we will only be doing a single...