Go is a programming language created by Google in 2012 that has gained popularity for building scalable and performant backend systems. Many large tech companies including Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Dropbox use Go for services and APIs. Companies report benefits of using Go including improved productivity for engineers, faster deployment times, ability to easily scale to many engineers, and better performance and scalability compared to languages like Ruby and Python. Go's statically compiled binaries, concurrency features, and standard library make it well-suited for systems programming tasks like building servers, tools, and distributed systems.