Google wants Go to become the go-to language for writing cloud apps

The Google-incubated Go language is one of the fastest growing programming languages today, with about one million active developers using it worldwide. But the company believes it can still accelerate its growth, especially when it comes to its role in writing cloud applications. And to do this, the company today announced Go Cloud, a new open-source library and set of tools that makes it easier to build cloud apps with Go.

While Go is highly popular among developers, Google argues that the language was missing a standard library for interfacing with cloud services. Today, developers often have to essentially write their own libraries to use the features of each cloud, but organizations today want to be able to easily move their workloads between clouds.

What Go Cloud then gives these developers is a set of open generic cloud APIs for accessing blog storage, MySQL databases and runtime configuration, as well as an HTTP server with built-in logging, tracing and health checking. Right now, the focus is on AWS and Google Cloud Platform. Over time, Google plans to add more features to Go Cloud and support for more cloud providers (and those cloud providers can, of course, build their own support, too).

This, Google argues, allows developer teams to build applications that can easily run on any supported cloud without having to re-architect large parts of their applications.

As Google VP of developer relations Adam Seligman told me, the company hopes this move will kick off an explosion of libraries around Go — and, of course, that it will accelerate Go’s growth as a language for the cloud.