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)

Summary

In this chapter, we looked at the reason to control parallelism and developed an appreciation for the complexity of the task when a shared state is involved. We used the example of an overworked cashier as a programming problem to solve and to experiment with channels, and further explored different types of channels and the nuances involved with using them. For example, we saw that both closed buffered and unbuffered channels will cause panic if we try to send messages on them, and receiving messages from them leads to different results based on whether the channel is buffered and if the channel is empty or full. We also saw how to wait on multiple channels without blocking on any with the help of select.

In later chapters, from Chapter 5, Introducing Goophr, through to Chapter 8, Deploying Goophr, we will be developing a distributed web application. This requires us...