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micro/go-micro

📈 Trending22,750GoAudience · developerComplexity · 3/5ActiveLicenseSetup · moderate

TLDR

A Go framework for building microservices that handles service discovery, load balancing, messaging, and inter-service communication automatically.

Mindmap

mindmap
  root((Go Micro))
    What it does
      Service discovery
      Load balancing
      RPC communication
      Pub/sub messaging
    Key features
      Pluggable backends
      Auto encoding
      Configuration mgmt
      Authentication
    Use cases
      Multi-service backends
      Distributed systems
      Event-driven apps
    Tech stack
      Go
      RPC
      Pub/sub
    When to use
      Starting microservices
      Splitting monoliths

Things people build with this

USE CASE 1

Build a backend split into multiple independently deployable services that discover and communicate with each other automatically.

USE CASE 2

Start with a monolithic Go app and gradually split it into microservices without rewriting communication logic.

USE CASE 3

Create event-driven systems where services broadcast and subscribe to messages asynchronously.

USE CASE 4

Deploy services across multiple machines with automatic load balancing and failover.

Tech stack

GoRPCPub/SubgRPCProtocol Buffers

Getting it running

Difficulty · moderate Time to first run · 30min

Requires Go runtime and understanding of gRPC/Protocol Buffers to run example services.

Use freely for any purpose, including commercial use, as long as you keep the copyright notice and license text.

In plain English

Go Micro is a framework for building distributed systems and microservices in Go. Microservices is an architectural style where a large application is broken into many small, independently running services that communicate over a network. Go Micro provides the toolkit that makes building and connecting those services practical. The problem it solves: when you split an application into many services, you immediately face a set of complex problems, how do services find each other, how do they communicate reliably, how do you handle load balancing, authentication, and configuration across all of them? Go Micro provides built-in, pluggable answers to all of these questions so developers do not need to solve them from scratch. How it works: you define a service, register request handlers on it, and run it. Go Micro handles service discovery (automatically making your service findable by others using multicast DNS), load balancing (distributing calls across multiple instances), message encoding (converting data between formats automatically), and asynchronous messaging (letting services broadcast events to each other). Everything is designed to be swappable, you can replace the default discovery, storage, or messaging systems with different backends. You would use Go Micro when building a Go backend that needs to run as multiple independently deployable services, or when starting with a single app that you want to be able to split apart later. The tech stack is Go, with support for RPC communication, pub/sub messaging, and pluggable backends for storage and service discovery.

Copy-paste prompts

Prompt 1
Show me how to create a simple Go Micro service that registers itself and handles RPC requests from other services.
Prompt 2
How do I set up service discovery in Go Micro so my services can find each other without hardcoding addresses?
Prompt 3
Write an example of two Go Micro services communicating via pub/sub messaging to handle events asynchronously.
Prompt 4
How do I replace Go Micro's default service discovery with a custom backend like Consul or etcd?
Prompt 5
Show me how to add load balancing and retry logic to Go Micro service calls.
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Generated 2026-05-18 · Model: sonnet-4-6 · Verify against the repo before relying on details.