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Distributed Computing with Go
Distributed Computing with Go

Distributed Computing with Go: Practical concurrency and parallelism for Go applications

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Distributed Computing with Go

Understanding Goroutines

Software development and programming has advanced quite a lot in the past decade. Many concepts that were previously considered academic and inefficient are beginning to find a place among modern software solutions. Two such concepts are coroutines (goroutines in Go) and channels. Conceptually, they have evolved over time and they have been implemented differently in each programming language. In many programming languages such as Ruby or Clojure, they are implemented as libraries, but in Go, they are implemented within the language as a native feature. As we shall see, this makes the language really modern, quite efficient, and an advanced programming language.

In this chapter we will try to gain an understanding of Go by looking at goroutines and the following topics:

  • Concurrency and parallelism
  • Go's runtime scheduler
  • Gotchas when using goroutines...

Concurrency and parallelism

Computer and software programs are useful because they do a lot of laborious work very fast and can also do multiple things at once. We want our programs to be able to do multiple things simultaneously, that is, multitask, and the success of a programming language can depend on how easy it is to write and understand multitasking programs.

Concurrency and parallelism are two terms that we are bound to come across often when looking into multitasking and they are often used interchangeably. However, they mean two distinctly different things.

The standard definitions given on the Go blog (https://blog.golang.org/concurrency-is-not-parallelism) are as follows:

  • Concurrency: Concurrency is about dealing with lots of things at once. This means that we manage to get multiple things done at once in a given period of time. However, we will only be doing a single...

Go's runtime scheduler

The Go program, along with the runtime, is managed and executed on multiple OS threads. The runtime uses a scheduler strategy known as M:N scheduler, which will schedule M number of goroutines on N number of OS threads. As a result, whenever we need to run or switch to a different goroutine, the context switching will be fast, and this also enables us to use multiple cores of the CPU for parallel computing.

A solid understanding of Go's runtime and scheduler would be quite interesting and useful, and now would be a good time to look at them in detail.

From the Go scheduler's perspective, there are primarily three entities:

  • Goroutine (G)
  • OS thread or machine (M)
  • Context or processor (P)

Let's look at what they do. We will also be looking the partial struct definitions of these entities to provide a better idea of how scheduling is implemented...

Gotchas when using goroutines

By this point, we should have developed a good understanding of how goroutines and the scheduler works. Let's now look at a few things that may catch us by surprise while working with goroutines.

Single goroutine halting the complete program

We know that goroutines run across multiple threads and multiple cores. So what happens when we have a panic in one of the threads? Here is an example that would let us simulate such a situation. We will create a lot of similar goroutines, whose sole purpose is to take a number and divide it by itself after subtracting 10 from the denominator. This will work fine for the majority of cases, except when the number is 10. The following code implements the...

Summary

Goroutines are concurrent and, to an extent, parallel; however, we should think of them as being concurrent. The order of execution of goroutines is not predictable and we should not rely on them to be executed in any particular order.

We should also take care to handle errors and panics in our goroutines because even though they are being executed in parallel, a panic in one goroutine will crash the complete program. Finally, goroutines can block on system calls, however this will not block the execution of the program nor slow down the performance of the overall program.

We looked at a few of the design concepts behind Go's runtime scheduler to understand why all of this happens.

You might be wondering why we haven't discussed channels in this chapter. The reason is that by not relying on channels we were able to look at goroutines in their most elemental form...

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Key benefits

  • This book provides enough concurrency theory to give you a contextual understanding of Go concurrency
  • It gives weight to synchronous and asynchronous data streams in Golang web applications
  • It makes Goroutines and Channels completely familiar and natural to Go developers

Description

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.

Who is this book for?

This book is for developers who are familiar with the Golang syntax and have a good idea of how basic Go development works. It would be advantageous if you have been through a web application product cycle, although it’s not necessary.

What you will learn

  • • Gain proficiency with concurrency and parallelism in Go
  • • Learn how to test your application using Go s standard library
  • • Learn industry best practices with technologies such as REST, OpenAPI, Docker, and so on
  • • Design and build a distributed search engine
  • • Learn strategies on how to design a system for web scale
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Publication date : Feb 28, 2018
Length: 246 pages
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Language : English
ISBN-13 : 9781787125384
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Length: 246 pages
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ISBN-13 : 9781787125384
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Table of Contents

10 Chapters
Developer Environment for Go Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Understanding Goroutines Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Channels and Messages Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
The RESTful Web Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Introducing Goophr Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Goophr Concierge Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Goophr Librarian Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Deploying Goophr Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Foundations of Web Scale Architecture Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Other Books You May Enjoy Chevron down icon Chevron up icon

Customer reviews

Rating distribution
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Half star icon Empty star icon 3.6
(5 Ratings)
5 star 40%
4 star 20%
3 star 20%
2 star 0%
1 star 20%
Abdul Gouse Apr 09, 2018
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5
Great book to learn Go and a very nice way of explaining the concepts by the author!He doesn't waste time explaining syntax of Go as this can be learnt from the internet.Instead most of the pages are spent discussing the inner workings of Go.I Am yet to complete the book but so far it has been very useful in filling the gaps in my understanding of Go and how to use it!
Amazon Verified review Amazon
Abhishek Nair Apr 09, 2018
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5
This book is an excellent starting point for people who want to start development in Go. It covers most of the important topic required to make you a competent developer and even helps people get started with writing test cases in go.I also love the docker sections.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
Garikipati Sridhar Apr 09, 2018
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Empty star icon 4
This is a great second book to read after A Tour of Go and/or The Go Programming Language.It covers all the necessary topics for use in software development industry like Docker, OpenAPI etc.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
Sebastien Oct 01, 2018
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Empty star icon Empty star icon 3
L'introduction sur Go et REST est intéressante. Par contre sur le côté Distribué c'est un peu rapide et on ne rentre pas trop dans les concept d'informatique distribué. Ces chapitres ont l'air d'être écrit un peu à la bourre. On a juste droit aux architectures classique Master / Master Mysql.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
Sri Indriawatty Aug 25, 2019
Full star icon Empty star icon Empty star icon Empty star icon Empty star icon 1
packt pub is back at it again with misleading title and underwhelming content. this book has nothing to do with distributed computing.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
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