Book Image

Hands-On RESTful Web Services with Go - Second Edition

By : Naren Yellavula
Book Image

Hands-On RESTful Web Services with Go - Second Edition

By: Naren Yellavula

Overview of this book

Building RESTful web services can be tough as there are countless standards and ways to develop API. In modern architectures such as microservices, RESTful APIs are common in communication, making idiomatic and scalable API development crucial. This book covers basic through to advanced API development concepts and supporting tools. You’ll start with an introduction to REST API development before moving on to building the essential blocks for working with Go. You’ll explore routers, middleware, and available open source web development solutions in Go to create robust APIs, and understand the application and database layers to build RESTful web services. You’ll learn various data formats like protocol buffers and JSON, and understand how to serve them over HTTP and gRPC. After covering advanced topics such as asynchronous API design and GraphQL for building scalable web services, you’ll discover how microservices can benefit from REST. You’ll also explore packaging artifacts in the form of containers and understand how to set up an ideal deployment ecosystem for web services. Finally, you’ll cover the provisioning of infrastructure using infrastructure as code (IaC) and secure your REST API. By the end of the book, you’ll have intermediate knowledge of web service development and be able to apply the skills you’ve learned in a practical way.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)

Using Redis to cache the API data

Redis is an in-memory database that can store key/value pairs. It best suits the use case of storing heavy read-intensive data. For example, news agencies such as the BBC and The Guardian show the latest news articles on their dashboard. Their traffic is high and, if documents are to be fetched from the database, they have to maintain a huge cluster of databases at all times.

Since the given set of news articles does not change (for hours), an agency can maintain a cache of articles. When the first customer visits the page, a copy is pulled from the DB, placed in the Redis cache, and then sent to the browser. Then, for another customer, the news agency server reads content from Redis instead of hitting the DB. Since Redis runs in the primary memory, latency is minimal. As a result, the customer sees faster page loads. The benchmarks on the web...