News

Go Language SDK Now in AWS Developer Preview

• By David Ramel
• 06/04/2015

Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS) has taken another step toward developing an official SDK for the Go programming language with the release of a developer preview.

After shaking out the initial SDK project -- which it acquired from another company -- in an experimental phase, AWS is inviting even more developers to play around with it and share their feedback as the project nears official release, joining the pantheon of other supported SDKs such as Java, C#, Ruby, Python, JavaScript, PHP and Objective-C.

Go is described by Wikipedia as "a statically typed language with syntax loosely derived from that of C, adding garbage collection, type safety, some dynamic-typing capabilities, additional built-in types such as variable-length arrays and key-value maps, and a large standard library."

After noticing increasing customer requests to support Go, AWS took over a third-party SDK project from a company called Stripe and, as announced in January, moved it to GitHub as an experimental project so developers could collect feedback, harden APIs, increase test coverage, and add some key new features such as request retries, checksum validation and hooks to request lifecycle events, exec Peter Moon said in a blog post.

In March, Moon followed up with another post in which he explained the project achieved another milestone as the "develop" and "master" branches of the code base were merged on GitHub.

"At this point the SDK's architecture and interfaces include the initial set of key changes we have envisioned, and we're excited to announce our progress and humbly invite customers to try out the SDK again," Moon said. "While collecting and responding to your valuable feedback, we will also continue to work on additional improvements including various usability features and better documentation."

The work on better documentation paid off, as Moon yesterday indicated the new developer preview now comes with a Getting Started guide.

"Since our last announcement, we've also added a concurrent streaming upload and download manager for Amazon S3, and built-in support for response pagination, with resource waiter support in the works," Moon said.

Moon also said that, as the project is now in developer preview, new updates will be rolled out as they become available.

"The goal of our Developer Preview cycle is to get feedback about what works and what does not so that we can make tweaks to our API before locking it down for a stable 1.0 release," Moon said, "so don't be shy about letting us know what you do and don't like on our GitHub issues page!