More Go Use in Production (Pivotal CF)

Travis Reeder, Iron.io co-founder and CTO, was at DevBeat 2013 on Tuesday talking about Iron.io’s use of Go language for our API services and backend functionality. (We use Ruby and other languages for workers and our app framework but Go has a special place here for things that need to run fast and handle high throughputs.)

The audience, many of whom were coming up to speed on Go, had a lot of great questions. A surprising number of hands went up when asked about using Go. A lesser but still impressive number raised their hands when asked about Go in production. (At the GoSF meetup we organized last week, not surprisingly, half the group’s hands went up on that question.)

Go is for sure making inroads into production-scale applications and cloud services. And so it’s no surprise to see another announcement yesterday about the use of Go in production. In this case Pivotal announced its release of Pivotal CF. Pivotal CF is a commercial offering built on the top of the open-source Cloud Foundry cloud platform environment. (The environment can be bootstrapped on existing hardware, run on either public or private virtualised machines on infrastructure such as OpenStack, Amazon EC2 or used directly in VMware’s vSphere virtual machines.)

What is interesting about the Pivotal announcement is how heavily Go makes it into the release notes to the public. It appears as the second highlighted section on their blog post and even finds its way into much of the press coverage on the announcement.

Here’s an excerpt from the post.

… Golang has been gaining traction as a language that is designed for highly concurrent applications. Within Cloud Foundry we’ve already got several components that are written in Go: the router, distributed logging system, health manager, and we’re working on more. Because Go is a language we already know, and has the great advantage of being able to create cross-compiled binaries, it seemed like the perfect match!

We realized a two years ago that Go is a tremendous advantage when it comes to building and running high-scale services on the cloud. Since then many other companies have been seeing the same thing – including companies such as Canonical, Airbrake, CloudFlare, Heroku, Rackspace, SoundCloud, Bitly, and more.

Seeing Pivotal join the ranks of Go users is certainly welcome company. And it’s especially welcome given how prominent Go plays in their strategic and technical decisions. More Go developers and more Go awareness makes us happy.

Well played, Pivotal, very well played.

Note: Iron.io hosts the GoSF meetup group which Pivotal Labs will be hosting in January. If you’re interested in Go, be sure to join one of the fastest growing hard-tech groups in the SF Bay Area.