While cloud business is booming, it isn't exactly for everyone.
Some businesses may find it cheaper and more reliable to own and operate their own data centers for doing specific tasks or reasons. This is one reason why huge companies use both public and private cloud.
Google's Go programming language on the other hand, has been around for years. With about one million active developers worldwide, it's considered as one of the fastest growing programming languages.
And if that is not enough, Google believes that it can accelerate Go's growth when it comes to its role in writing cloud apps.
This is by announcing 'Go Cloud', an open-source library which allows developers to build cloud apps using Go.
Google unveiled Go in 2009. While it’s one of the fastest growing programming languages, it's yet to get good traction outside of a few niches.
Google realized that there is an increase of demand for multi-cloud or hybrid cloud solutions, as well as the needs to write simpler applications. Meanwhile, Go wasn’t being fully leveraged by engineering teams, as there was a trade off between improving portability and shipping updates.
As developers often have to essentially write their own libraries to use the features of each cloud, meeting the requirements for multi-cloud and hybrid cloud can be daunting.
Google argues that the language was missing a standard library for interfacing with these cloud services.
Here, the company is changing this.
Saving developers' time, Google said that Go Cloud would allow developers to build applications that can easily run on any supported cloud without having to re-architect parts of their applications.
Go Cloud is a library that consists of a range of APIs. The team has "identified common services used by cloud applications and have created generic APIs to work across cloud providers." These APIs include:
- Blob storage.
- MySQL database access.
- Runtime configuration.
- HTTP server configured with request logging, tracing, and health checking.
"With this project," the team at Google explained, "we aim to make Go the language of choice for developers building portable cloud applications."
Initially at its launch, Go Cloud focuses on AWS and Google Cloud Platform. But later on, Google has plans to add more features to Go Cloud, and to support more cloud providers.