Go is a language with simple syntax, which requires a fair amount of learning how to do things differently if you come up from a high level language like TypeScript or C#. This article describes my experience trying to learn Go over the last 12 years. This is the third time I am trying to learn Go, and hopefully it will be the last. The pros and cons of Go I mention are based on what I considered important at that time, and are not based on much practical experience with Go.

Without CloudFormation When we started investigating ECS I started by reading basic AWS documentation and following several tutorials. Unfortunately I was following tutorials which used AWS console instead of CloudFormation. It was mainly because I didn’t have enough experience with CloudFormation and clicking in the AWS console seemed easier. Problem with not using CloudFormation was that I had to remember/make note of everything I did so I could repeat it. Several times I didn’t remember the steps correctly and had to spend several hours trying to reproduce it.

Our team started deploying to AWS two years ago. After getting more experience with it we have decided to reevaluate our options and decrease costs. Previous state and requirements We were deploying Node.js microservices to Elastic Beanstalk with one node process per machine and Nginx as a reverse proxy. Each service is deployed on several instances behind an AWS classic load balancer and has simple autoscaling rules. We have over 30 microservices and need to be able to quickly and easily create and deploy new services.

During the weekend of 13th to 15th October I have attended jOpenSpace unconference. Compared to standard conferences it has very loose format. On jOpenSpace every attendee prepares a 10 minutes long presentation on any topic. The benefit is that you can hear more new ideas and they are more condensed. If some topics are not relevant for you, you lose only 10 minutes instead of 1 hour on a standard conference.