12 Deployment and maintenance

So far, we’ve covered the basics of developing, debugging and testing web applications in Go. As is often said, however: the last 10% of development takes 90% of the time. In this chapter, we will be emphasizing this last 10% of application development in order to truly craft reliable and high quality web applications. In the first section, we will examine how production services generate logs, and the process of logging itself. The second section will describe dealing with runtime errors, and how to manage them when they occur so that the impact on end users is minimized. In the third section, we tackle the subject of deploying standalone Go programs, which can be tricky at first. As you might know, Go programs cannot be written with daemons like you would with a language such as C. We’ll discuss how background processes are typically managed in Go. Finally, our fourth and last section will address the process of backing up and recovering application data in Go. We’ll take a look at some techniques for ensuring that in the event of a crash, we will be able to maintain the integrity of our data.