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)

Monoliths versus microservices

It is a common practice to begin a software application as a monolith, and then break it down into microservices in the long run. This actually helps to focus on the application delivery, instead of blindly following the microservice pattern. Once the product is stabilized, then developers should find a way to break down product features. Take a look at the following diagram for the difference between a monolith and microservices:

This diagram depicts the structure of monolithic and microservices architectures. A monolith has everything wrapped in a single system. It is called a tightly coupled architecture. In contrast, microservices are individual entities that are easy to replace and modifiable. Each microservice can talk to one another through various transport mechanisms, such as HTTP, REST, or RPC. The data format exchanged between services...