This document discusses Uber's transition from a monolithic architecture to a microservices architecture and the adoption of Go as a primary programming language. It provides examples of some key Go services at Uber including Geofences, an early service, and Geobase, a more recent service. It also discusses Uber's development of open source Go libraries and tools like Ringpop, TChannel, go-torch, and others to help establish Go as a first-class language at Uber.

1. Go at Uber
Prashant Varanasi, Senior Engineer, RPC
April 26, 2016

2. ● Previously at Google — my first production experience with Go
● At Uber, I work on the RPC team
○ Support the Go client library for TChannel, our open source RPC framework
○ Building out the new fleetwide routing and load balancing sidecar
● One of the core reviewers for internal Go libraries
● Maintainer of the internal Go build infrastructure, go-build
About me
Java-free for 2 years

3. ● Traditionally used Python and Node.js
○ Node.js is popular in our marketplace
and dispatch services
○ Python is popular for business logic
as well as data analysis
● Almost all the business logic was
behind a monolithic Python API server
About Uber
From a large monolithic service...
The Uber Monolith
Users
Products
Background
Checks
Trips
Cities
Vehicles
Payments
Documents
Promos

4. ● As Uber grew (in features and
engineers), continuous integration
turned into a liability as deploying the
codebase meant deploying everything
● We followed the lead of other hyper-
growth companies (i.e., Twitter, Netflix)
and broke up the monolith into many
microservices.
● This allowed more flexibility in
languages
About Uber
...to over one thousand microservices
Users
ProductsTrips
Cities
Communication
between services
uses HTTP/JSON or
TChannel/Thrift

5. ● In 2014, Aiden Scandella, one of our early
engineers, experimented with Go
○ Deployed a sandbox marketplace for the Uber
External API
● By early 2015, Go was used across the
company,
○ Data Engineering: A cross-cluster query cache
○ Marketplace: The Geofences service
● Go was selected for the following characteristics:
○ Simple language, high developer productivity
○ Strong concurrency and parallelism built in
Introduction of Go
Cross-language microservices

6. Building up the ecosystem

7. ● No standardized support for Go (build, lint, coverage) in our internal
infrastructure
○ Custom Makefiles integrated with go-junit-report and gocov
● Dependency management, used godep
○ Builds passed locally but not on build machines due to missing deps
○ Vendored dependencies hard to manage and review
● Lack of libraries for internal infrastructure
○ E.g., Kafka logging, dynamic configuration, background tasks
Making Go a first-class citizen

8. go-buildOld Way
Build Infrastructure
From copy+pasted Makefiles and shell scripts to a common submodule

9. ● Before the GO15VENDOREXPERIMENT, we started with godep
○ Vendored dependencies in every repo
○ Even internal dependencies were vendored as godep restore was flaky
○ Noisy code reviews, hard to update dependencies,
● The glide migration
○ Users can choose to check in their dependencies in the vendor folder
○ Or check in glide.yaml and glide.lock and have dependencies
installed before build
○ Use an internal Github mirror to avoid outages affecting internal builds
Dependency Management
From godep to glide

10. ● Base libraries used by almost all services: config, metrics, logging, tracing,
RPC
● Utility and extension libraries:
○ Transport helpers, JSON + HTTP, TChannel + Thrift
○ Backoff, LRU cache, flags, worker pools
● Libraries for internal infrastructure built up over time
○ Storage (schemaless -- internal key-value store built on MySQL)
○ Translations, AVRO-encoded logging, dynamic config, experiments
Libraries for internal infrastructure
Monorepo of Go libraries

11. ● Now have over a hundred services written in Go
● Two years of production experience
○ Integrated runtime metrics (#goroutines, GC stats)
○ Easy profiling of services running in production
○ Investigated and fixed file descriptor leaks in open
source libraries
○ Even found a compiler bug that led to stack corruption
● Strong library and infrastructure support
● Lots of resources: documentation, classes, mailing list
● Now the recommended language for new services
Experience with Go
Writing code is fun again

12. What’s built in Go?

13. Goal: given a lat/lng pair, find the list of geofences this location falls in
● HTTP/JSON interface
● High throughput, low latency (P99 < 100ms)
● No infrastructure support, so project handled everything:
○ Config: Used the standard “encoding/json” package
○ Logging: wrapped the standard “log” package, and reported errors to
Sentry
○ Metrics: Wrapped open source StatsD client
Blog Post
Geofences
One of the earliest Go services at Uber

14. Goal: match riders to drivers, sharding the matching across machines
● Ringpop for sharding the matching by location
● TChannel / Thrift for RPC interface
● Uses our internal libraries for:
○ Config (both static, and dynamic configuration)
○ Logging (includes logging to disk, Kafka, and Sentry)
○ Metrics (reported to M3, our internal Metrics infrastructure)
● Much more infrastructure support for Go services
Geobase
One of the more recent Go services at Uber

15. ● Embeddable application level sharding:
○ Fault detection: provides membership list of alive
nodes using a variation of SWIM (similar to Serf)
○ Consistent hashing: keys are hashed to a node,
and failures will not create load imbalances or
redistribute every key
○ Forwarding: provides forward of HTTP or
TChannel requests
● Used for sharding work, sharded cache, serializing
requests to a resource (in-order)
Ringpop
Scalable, fault-tolerant application-layer sharding. Open source!

16. ● Strong forwarding performance, as it was built for Ringpop forwarding
● Built on top of TCP, provides multiplexing and framing
○ Supports out of order responses, no head of line blocking
○ Very simple protocol, easy to implement in multiple languages
● Provides high-level RPC features:
○ Timeouts, consistent retry semantics
○ Connection management and smart peer selection
● Integrates with Thrift as a first-class citizen
TChannel
Intra-datacenter RPC protocol. Open source, available for Go, Java, Node, and Python

17. ● Strong integration with Thrift
○ Uses net/context
○ Integrates with error values
val, err := client.Get(ctx, key)
if err != nil {
switch err := err.(type) {
case *keyvalue.KeyNotFound:
// Handle Thrift exception
default:
// Unknown error
}
}
TChannel + Thrift
Intra-datacenter RPC protocol. Open source, available for Go, Java, Node, and Python

18. ● Often used internally with Python and Node.js
● Uses pprof output to generate the flamegraph
go-torch
Visualization of profiling output. Open source!

19. ● Powers the majority of high QPS services at Uber
● Already the most popular language for new services
● Open source our core libraries and tools
■ TChannel, Ringpop, go-torch, yab (beta), zap (beta)
■ Working with open source community on opentracing
● Check out our engineering blog and Github page for more information
Go at Uber

20. Thanks