I was recently restructuring one of my early Go side projects. As I was changing the project layout, I was reminded there are many recommendations out there but no set standard for structuring Golang projects. In other programming languages such as Java, there is a typical project layout that most…

Graceful shutdown is vital to building highly resilient systems in a cloud-native environment. When we build cloud-native applications that follow the “cattle and not pets” philosophy, creating and destroying instances of applications is standard operating procedure. This article will discuss why it’s important to implement graceful shutdown mechanisms and how…

A standard performance tuning recommendation for distributed systems running on Linux is to adjust the tcp_rmem and tcp_wmem Kernel tunables. But what are these? Why are they important? How do they work? In today's article, we are going to explore the tcp_rmem (Receive Buffer) and tcp_wmem (Send Buffer) work and…

Concurrency is such a foundational capability of the Go language that it is effortless to write code that leverages multiple goroutines, sometimes without even knowing. As an example, if you’ve ever used the net/http package to create a web service, you’ve used goroutines. To handle incoming HTTP traffic, the HTTP…

Let’s face it, even with all the changes in how we run systems at scale, shell scripts are still a go-to tool in the DevOps & Site Reliability Engineers toolbelt. The simplicity of BASH has kept it relevant, but even though we rely on these shell scripts daily, they are…

While most systems these days integrate over gRPC or HTTP, quite a few applications still speak custom protocols. And many of these custom protocols don't have handy packages like net/http to manage all of the TCP connection creation and management. Today's article is for anyone working directly with TCP connections…

Working with TCP servers is a great way to become familiar with low-level network communications. When writing applications that communicate directly over TCP sockets a multitude of socket management steps are required. Actions that you typically don’t have to take for a typical HTTP-based application. Sometimes, those extra management steps…