Book Image

Microservices with Go

By : Alexander Shuiskov
Book Image

Microservices with Go

By: Alexander Shuiskov

Overview of this book

This book covers the key benefits and common issues of microservices, helping you understand the problems microservice architecture helps to solve, the issues it usually introduces, and the ways to tackle them. You’ll start by learning about the importance of using the right principles and standards in order to achieve the key benefits of microservice architecture. The following chapters will explain why the Go programming language is one of the most popular languages for microservice development and lay down the foundations for the next chapters of the book. You’ll explore the foundational aspects of Go microservice development including service scaffolding, service discovery, data serialization, synchronous and asynchronous communication, deployment, and testing. After covering the development aspects, you’ll progress to maintenance and reliability topics. The last part focuses on more advanced topics of Go microservice development including system reliability, observability, maintainability, and scalability. In this part, you’ll dive into the best practices and examples which illustrate how to apply the key ideas to existing applications, using the services scaffolded in the previous part as examples. By the end of this book, you’ll have gained hands-on experience with everything you need to develop scalable, reliable and performant microservices using Go.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
1
Part 1: Introduction
3
Part 2: Foundation
12
Part 3: Maintenance

The basics of serialization

Serialization is the process of converting data into a format that allows you to transfer it, store it, and later deconstruct it back.

This process is illustrated in the following diagram:

Figure 4.1 – The serialization and deserialization process

As illustrated in the diagram, the process of transforming the original data is called serialization, and the reverse process of transforming it back is called deserialization.

Serialization has two primary use cases:

  • Transferring the data between services, acting as a common language between them
  • Encoding and decoding arbitrary data for storage, allowing you to store complex data structures as byte arrays or regular strings

In Chapter 2, while scaffolding our applications, we created our HTTP API endpoints and set them to return JSON responses to the callers. In that case, JSON played the role of a serialization format, allowing us to transform our data...