News

AWS Going Big on Go

• By David Ramel
• 01/23/2018

Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS) is continuing to add support for Google's Go programming language across its myriad development services.

Earlier this month, for example, it launched a developer preview of its SDK for Go 2.0, and more recently followed up by announcing Go support for AWS Lambda, its "serverless" computing service.

While Lambda is part of the so-called serverless movemement, it of course depends on servers running in the cloud. The serverless part just means developers don't have to worry about hand-coding all the nitty-gritty details of provisioning and managing servers for specific projects. Instead, Lambda hosts code that's triggered externally, typically in response to events, and users pay only for the compute time consumed.

"You simply upload your Go executable artifact as a ZIP file through the AWS CLI or Lambda console and select the go1.x runtime," AWS said in a blog post last week announcing the new Go support. "With Lambda, you can use Go's native tools to build and package your code."

The Go support keeps coming despite the fact that the programming language (often referred to as Golang because of its generic name) originated some nine years ago at Google, which is a major cloud computing platform rival of AWS. It was subsequently open sourced.

Last week, AWS provided further details on Lambda's new support for Go:

You can also use the AWS Serverless Application Model (SAM) to deploy and manage your serverless application authored in Go. In addition, AWS CodeStar’s Go templates let you easily set up an entire development and continuous delivery toolchain for your serverless application. Once the application has been deployed, you can use AWS X-Ray and its Go SDK to troubleshoot and analyze the performance of your application. Support for testing Go functions locally with SAM Local is coming soon.

AWS said the Go runtime is available in all regions where Lambda is available.