17 Major Companies That Use Golang in 2025

What started as Google's internal solution to server-scale challenges has evolved into the backbone of modern software architecture. American Express uses Golang for both payment and rewards networks, achieving the speed and scalability required for massive transaction volumes. PayPal discovered significant value in Go's ability to produce clean, efficient code that scales seamlessly as software deployment grows.

The numbers tell a compelling story. Trading platforms built with Golang can process thousands of transactions per second, making it indispensable for fintech companies requiring real-time performance. SendGrid processes and sends billions of emails monthly using Go's efficient architecture. These aren't isolated success stories—they represent a broader shift toward Go adoption across industries.

Why are these companies choosing Go over established alternatives? CockroachDB found that Go's performance benefits, garbage collection, and low barrier to entry made it an excellent fit for their database technology. The language's combination of simplicity and sophisticated tooling allows organizations to scale not just their services, but their entire software engineering processes.

Companies using Go benefit from its garbage collection capabilities and lightweight goroutines that make application scaling straightforward. This technical foundation enables organizations to maintain simplicity while handling increasingly complex operations—a balance that traditional languages often struggle to achieve.

Uber

Ride-sharing giant Uber has built one of the most impressive Go implementations in the industry, with their infrastructure representing a masterclass in large-scale microservices architecture.

What Uber does

Uber's mission centers on making "transportation as reliable as running water, everywhere, for everyone". This isn't just marketing speak—it reflects the technical reality of their platform. The company processes enormous volumes of real-time data to connect riders with drivers across their global network. Unlike most digital services that exist purely online, Uber operates in the physical world where timing matters. People depend on their technology to earn income or reach destinations, creating an environment where system failures have immediate, tangible consequences.

How Uber uses Golang

Golang occupies a central position in Uber's technology stack alongside Python, Node.js, and Java. The scale of their Go implementation is remarkable: their monorepo contains approximately 50 million lines of code and houses around 2,100 unique Go services. This represents one of the largest Go deployments in the industry.

The company adopted Go strategically for high-performance applications. Critical systems like geofencing and surge pricing—both requiring rapid, concurrent processing—run on Go infrastructure. Uber even migrated their highly concurrent geofence lookup service from Node.js to Go, demonstrating their confidence in the language's capabilities for mission-critical operations.

Benefits Uber gained from Golang

Go's concurrency model delivers exactly what Uber needs for their real-time operations. The language treats concurrency as a "first-class citizen" through goroutines, allowing developers to create them liberally to hide latency. This architectural decision proves essential when coordinating thousands of simultaneous ride requests.

Beyond performance, Go's simplicity enables Uber's engineering teams to iterate and improve systems quickly. As their engineering team puts it: "Go gives us efficiency, simplicity, and runtime speed". This combination becomes crucial when managing a codebase spanning 50 million lines across thousands of services.

Performance improvements with Golang at Uber

The numbers speak for themselves. When Uber migrated their geofence lookup service to Go, CPU usage dropped by 50%. This isn't just a minor optimization—it represents significant cost savings across their global infrastructure.

More recently, Uber collaborated with Google to implement Profile-Guided Optimization (PGO) in Go, achieving approximately 4% performance improvement through optimized inlining. While 4% might sound modest, at Uber's scale this optimization eliminated the need for 24,000 CPU cores across their top services. These results demonstrate why companies choosing Golang often see dramatic improvements in resource efficiency.

Twitch

Live streaming presents unique technical challenges that most platforms never encounter. Popular streaming giant Twitch discovered this reality while building one of the world's largest live video distribution systems, ultimately finding Golang essential for powering its most critical infrastructure components.

What Twitch does

Twitch connects millions of content creators with their audiences through a platform that operates at remarkable scale. The system processes over 15 million daily active users through its video processing pipeline. At peak capacity, more than 2 million concurrent video streams flow through their infrastructure.

Beyond video delivery lies an equally impressive challenge: Twitch maintains a massive real-time chat system delivering over 10 billion messages daily. Their web APIs process an average of 50,000 requests per second, creating a technical environment where performance bottlenecks can instantly affect millions of users.

How Twitch uses Golang

Since late 2013, Twitch has implemented Golang across numerous high-traffic systems. Let's examine their most significant implementation: the platform's IRC-based chat infrastructure represents one of their earliest and most successful Go deployments.

This system employs multiple specialized components written in Go. Edge handles message receiving and distribution, while Pubsub manages internal message distribution. Clue analyzes user actions, and Room maintains viewer list management. Additionally, Twitch developed Twirp, an RPC framework in Go that facilitates communication between backend servers.

Benefits Twitch gained from Golang

Twitch engineers consistently highlight Go's simplicity, safety, performance, and readability as ideal matches for their high-scale challenges. The language's built-in concurrency support enables the platform to handle multiple streams and chat rooms simultaneously. This technical foundation maintains a seamless user experience regardless of concurrent usage levels.

Perhaps most importantly for a live streaming platform, Golang's efficiency allows Twitch to scale services rapidly during unpredictable traffic surges. "Refresh storms" can cause 20x normal load in seconds—a scenario that would cripple systems without robust concurrency capabilities.

Performance improvements with Golang at Twitch

Admittedly, tracking performance improvements across successive Go runtime versions reveals just how much the language has evolved. Between Go 1.4 and Go 1.6, Twitch achieved a 20x improvement in garbage collection pause times. Further optimizations in Go 1.6 cut these pauses in half again.

By pre-release Go 1.7, typical pause times dropped to approximately 1ms—representing a 10x improvement over tuned Go 1.6 configurations. More recently, Twitch implemented a memory ballast technique that reduced CPU utilization by approximately 30% while decreasing overall 99th percentile API latency during peak load by roughly 45%.

Dropbox

Cloud storage pioneer Dropbox made one of the boldest migration decisions in tech history. Initially built on Python, the company recognized a fundamental limitation: their performance-critical backends couldn't scale to serve millions of users efficiently. In 2013, they made a strategic decision to migrate to Go, a move that would eventually encompass most of their infrastructure.

What Dropbox does

Dropbox operates cloud-based storage and file sharing services that have become essential infrastructure for over 500 million users worldwide. The platform faces a unique technical challenge—managing millions of concurrent file operations while ensuring every sync happens reliably across multiple devices. This isn't just about storing files; it's about maintaining perfect consistency when millions of users simultaneously upload, download, and modify documents across their devices.

How Dropbox uses Golang

The migration story began with performance bottlenecks. Dropbox utilizes Golang primarily to enhance its file synchronization processes, delivering faster and more efficient management of user files. Rather than a complete rewrite, they strategically migrated performance-sensitive components starting in 2013. Today, most of Dropbox's infrastructure runs on Go-powered systems.

The company has even developed an unofficial Go SDK that allows developers to integrate with the Dropbox API, though it remains in beta status without formal support. This SDK demonstrates their commitment to Go beyond internal infrastructure.

Benefits Dropbox gained from Golang

Go's architectural advantages proved perfect for Dropbox's use case. Most significantly, Go's goroutines require only 2 kB of memory each, enabling millions of concurrent processes without crashes. This efficiency directly addresses Dropbox's core challenge: handling simultaneous file operations from millions of users without system failures.

The migration from Python to Go delivered measurable business value through lower infrastructure costs and improved response times. Speed and simplicity—two core attributes of Go—proved essential for building Dropbox's scalable file storage systems. These improvements explain why Dropbox, alongside other major cloud service providers, continues to rely heavily on Go for powering its services.

SoundCloud

Music streaming pioneer SoundCloud established itself as an early adopter of Golang, integrating the language into its stack alongside Ruby on Rails back in 2012. This forward-thinking approach has since expanded across their infrastructure.

What SoundCloud does

SoundCloud operates as a global online audio distribution platform and music streaming service reaching users in 190 countries. The platform hosts around 300 million tracks—a collection three times larger than similar services—while serving approximately 76 million active users monthly. At its core, SoundCloud connects listeners with artists through seamless audio content delivery while managing enormous amounts of streaming data.

How SoundCloud uses Golang

SoundCloud describes itself as "polyglot," with Go playing an increasingly important role in backend infrastructure despite Ruby on Rails remaining at the top of their stack. The company currently maintains about half a dozen services and over a dozen repositories written entirely in Go.

Their search infrastructure showcases Go's strategic value. While driven by Elastic Search, this system is managed and interfaced with the rest of SoundCloud almost exclusively through Go services. Additionally, their deployment system called Bazooka—designed for managing internal services—was built using Go specifically for its ability to handle complex state machines safely.

Benefits SoundCloud gained from Golang

SoundCloud engineers describe Go as a "WYSIWYG language," meaning the code does exactly what it says on the page. This clarity dramatically reduces onboarding time, with engineers confidently stating that "time from zero to productive commits is faster in Go than any other language we use".

The practical benefits extend beyond individual productivity. Golang's static typing and fast compilation enable near-realtime static analysis and unit testing during development. Some ideas can progress from whiteboard to production in less than an hour—a remarkable achievement for any engineering team.

Code reviews on Go projects focus more on the problem domain rather than language intricacies. Go's "only one way to do things" philosophy eliminates time wasted on style debates, allowing developers to concentrate on solving actual business problems. This streamlined approach has enabled SoundCloud to deliver uninterrupted music streaming experiences even during peak usage times.

Google

Google created Golang, which automatically places it at the center of every discussion about companies using this programming language.

What Google does

Google's mission centers on organizing the world's information and making it universally accessible and useful. The company operates massive-scale services that few organizations can match. Their Core Data Solutions team maintains web indexing services across the globe, powering products like Google Search. Chrome's backend services include the Chrome Optimization Guide service, which operates in the critical path for users. Google also provides Firebase Hosting services for Google Cloud customers, delivering static web hosting through global content delivery networks.

How Google uses Golang

Back in 2007, Google engineers developed Go specifically to solve server challenges at Google's scale. The language went public in November 2009, and since then, Google has implemented it across numerous internal projects. Today, Go powers significant portions of Google Cloud and Google Kubernetes Engine. The Core Data Solutions team relies on Go for web indexing services, while the Chrome Optimization Guide service—operating in users' critical path—runs on Go. Google continues advancing the language itself, with Go 1.24 introducing performance improvements that decrease CPU overhead for most applications.

Benefits Google gained from Golang

Creating their own programming language has delivered substantial returns across multiple areas:

• Superior scalability - Go scales exceptionally well to large projects, unlike C++ which scales poorly

• Speed without complexity - Performance nearly matching C/C++ without the difficult aspects and common error sources

• Standardized approach to concurrency and tooling across large enterprise codebases

• Faster compilation times - Critical for Google's enormous codebase

Google built Go as a practical solution to real engineering problems rather than a theoretical language experiment. This pragmatic foundation has made it ideal for Google's network services and cloud infrastructure, establishing the groundwork for the widespread adoption we see across other companies today.

Netflix

What does it take to deliver binge-worthy content to millions of viewers simultaneously without buffering interruptions? Streaming giant Netflix has found part of the answer in Golang, implementing it across critical infrastructure components that keep their global entertainment machine running smoothly.

What Netflix does

Founded in 1997, Netflix operates as an American production company providing subscription-based streaming services to millions of users worldwide. The platform has evolved into a global entertainment powerhouse, delivering personalized content across devices. The technical challenge is staggering—Netflix must handle millions of concurrent streams efficiently, requiring backend systems that maintain reliability while minimizing latency. The service relies on a diverse technology stack including Java, Spring Boot, Python, React.js, Node.js, and AWS for its cloud infrastructure.

How Netflix uses Golang

Netflix employs Go strategically for performance-critical systems where latency and concurrency matter most. Rend, a high-performance Memcached-compatible proxy and server written entirely in Go, serves live member traffic as part of Netflix's EVCache system. This represents just one piece of their Go implementation strategy.

The company also utilizes Golang for:

• Distributed tracing systems that monitor and debug microservices at scale

• Cloud orchestration tools managing thousands of microservices

• Chaos Monkey, the company's resilience testing tool that simulates failures in production environments

Netflix's engineering team made a deliberate choice, seeking "something that had lower latency than Java (where garbage collection pauses are an issue) and is more productive for developers than C, while also handling tens of thousands of client connections".

Benefits Netflix gained from Golang

Go's concurrency capabilities enable Netflix to handle multiple user requests simultaneously, ensuring shows start promptly without delays or buffering issues. Netflix engineers appreciate Go's clean and intuitive syntax, which allows them to focus on building new features rather than wrestling with language complexity.

The practical impact becomes clear in Netflix's global expansion story. They rewrote their connection management service in Go specifically to support worldwide growth. The language proved ideal for handling thousands of simultaneous connections per second while consuming less CPU and memory than Java or Python alternatives. This efficiency helps Netflix maintain their streaming leadership while controlling operational costs—a crucial advantage in the competitive entertainment landscape.

BBC

The world's oldest national broadcasting organization has quietly built one of the most resilient digital infrastructures in media. Since 2012, the BBC has relied on Golang to handle the unique pressures that come with serving the British public during moments when the entire nation turns to their screens.

What BBC does

Few organizations face the digital equivalent of a perfect storm quite like the BBC. Election nights, royal weddings, major sporting events—these occasions create traffic surges that would cripple most websites. The corporation operates across television, radio, and digital platforms, delivering news, entertainment, and educational content to audiences worldwide. Their multimedia website ranks among the largest globally, but scale alone doesn't capture the real challenge.

The BBC's public service mission creates obligations that commercial media companies simply don't face. When breaking news hits or national events unfold, millions of users expect immediate, reliable access to information. There's no luxury of gradual scaling or accepting downtime during peak moments.

How BBC uses Golang

The corporation turned to Go for content delivery across its extensive digital platforms, focusing primarily on backend and internal analytic services. BBC developers have built Go-based solutions for web crawlers and scrapers that gather and process data. These systems form the backbone of content distribution, quietly managing the technical complexity behind seamless user experiences.

What makes BBC's implementation particularly interesting is how Go handles traffic spikes during major events. The language's ability to maximize CPU utilization has proven essential for the corporation's backend infrastructure.

Benefits BBC gained from Golang

The results speak for themselves during high-profile events when viewership surges dramatically. BBC's Go-powered systems process multiple requests simultaneously, ensuring users can access content quickly when they need it most. The language's efficiency enables developers to create high-performance web applications that handle large-scale workloads without quality compromises.

Go's clear syntax and minimalistic approach have simplified the development process for BBC engineers. This translates to operational advantages—the corporation delivers uninterrupted content access despite growing demand for high-quality digital experiences. BBC's early adoption of Golang has positioned it well among media companies seeking scalable solutions for content delivery challenges.

Docker

Container virtualization pioneer Docker built its entire platform on Golang, creating one of the most successful examples of Go-powered developer infrastructure.

What Docker does

Docker provides a containerization platform that enables developers to package, distribute, and run applications in containers. These lightweight, standalone packages include everything needed to run an application: code, runtime, system tools, libraries, and settings. The platform allows applications to run consistently across different environments, providing developers with a standardized unit for deployment.

Docker has become essential for modern software development, simplifying the process of building, shipping, and running applications. The technology addresses a fundamental challenge developers face—ensuring applications work the same way regardless of where they're deployed.

How Docker uses Golang

Docker's core technology is built primarily with Go. The company chose Golang specifically because of the language's excellent fit for building infrastructure tools. Docker developers use Go extensively for their internal toolchain, alongside creating Go-based solutions for containerizing Go applications themselves.

Their approach often involves multi-stage builds that create significantly smaller images. This technique can reduce container size from over 300MB to just 6MB in some cases. The dramatic size reduction minimizes potential security vulnerabilities while improving performance across deployment pipelines.

Benefits Docker gained from Golang

Docker gained several key advantages by building their platform with Go:

• Faster compile times - Go's built-in dependency management and strong opinions on code formatting improve developer productivity

• Easy cross-compilation - Go makes it simple to create binaries for different operating systems and architectures

• Smaller application sizes - Go's static binaries are perfect for the microservices deployment strategies Docker excels at delivering

• Optimized performance - The language's efficiency helps containers spin up quickly, critical for containerized applications

Docker's Go implementation creates a symbiotic relationship between the language and the platform. This relationship makes Docker an excellent tool for defining development environments in code, ensuring team members and CI systems use identical toolsets. The result is a more reliable development process with fewer environment-related issues.

SendGrid

Email delivery presents unique technical challenges that most developers never consider. SendGrid processes more than 500 million messages daily, placing it among the most demanding applications of Golang for mission-critical communication infrastructure.

What SendGrid does

SendGrid operates as a cloud-based email transaction service that enables businesses to deliver messages securely and efficiently. As part of Twilio's communication ecosystem, the company serves as the backbone for countless organizations requiring dependable email delivery—from marketing campaigns to transactional notifications. Their email delivery system demands both high throughput and consistently low latency to ensure timely message delivery for customers worldwide.

How SendGrid uses Golang

The company's journey to Go reflects the evolution of modern email infrastructure. SendGrid originally built their backend systems in Perl/AnyEvent during their early years, eventually transitioning to Python/Twisted. However, as message volumes grew exponentially, the team recognized that traditional approaches couldn't handle their scale requirements.

SendGrid made a strategic decision to adopt Go as its primary development language. Currently, the company utilizes Golang extensively for their core email infrastructure, systematically rewriting critical features to enhance robustness, speed, and reliability. The implementation harnesses Go's lightweight goroutines and powerful concurrency patterns to manage the asynchronous operations that define email delivery.

Benefits SendGrid gained from Golang

The results speak to Go's effectiveness for communication infrastructure. Go effectively solved the concurrent programming challenges that were fundamental to SendGrid's operations. Developers noted that this improvement resulted in significantly reduced maintenance costs over time.

What's particularly interesting is how enthusiastic SendGrid engineers became about Go's potential—many invested personal time experimenting with the language before its official adoption. This organic adoption pattern often indicates a technology's genuine value to developers.

Golang's concurrency model enabled SendGrid to efficiently process millions of emails simultaneously. For a communications infrastructure provider, they achieved both high throughput and consistently low latency in their email delivery system. Additionally, SendGrid benefits from open-sourcing Go libraries they develop, strengthening their position in the developer community while improving their hiring process.

Monzo

Digital banking innovator Monzo took a different approach than most technology companies. Rather than migrating to Golang after encountering scale limitations, they built their entire banking infrastructure on Go from day one.

What Monzo does

Founded in 2015, Monzo operates as one of the UK's pioneering app-based challenger banks, currently serving over 7.5 million customers as of 2023. The mobile-first bank holds a full UK banking license under Financial Conduct Authority regulation, offering comprehensive digital banking services. Users can track spending by category, set budgets, send instant payments to other Monzo users, earn interest on savings, and access traditional banking features like overdrafts and joint accounts. The platform also supports Apple Pay, Google Pay, and 3D Secure online payments.

How Monzo uses Golang

Most companies evolve from monolithic architectures to microservices. Monzo chose the opposite path. According to Matt Heath, Principal Engineer at Monzo, the company selected Go specifically for its memory management capabilities, static typing, and excellent concurrency primitives. This strategic decision resulted in over 1,600 microservices powering their banking systems, all packaged within Docker containers and deployed on Kubernetes.

The scale becomes impressive during peak usage. These systems process 4,000 transactions per second while running on AWS cloud services alongside open-source technologies including Linux, Apache Cassandra, and PostgreSQL databases.

Benefits Monzo gained from Golang

Golang's concurrency features enabled Monzo to build a banking platform capable of scaling to serve hundreds of millions of customers worldwide. The architecture maintains 99.9% system uptime without maintenance windows or single points of failure. Beyond technical reliability, Monzo reduced operational costs by approximately 20% after implementing Golang.

Matt Heath captures the essence of their success: "Go is a perfect language for creating microservice architectures... allowing the easy creation of small and simple networked services at Monzo that are focused around the 'single responsibility principle'".

Facebook

What happens when the world's largest social network needs to process billions of user interactions daily? Facebook—now Meta—turned to Golang for specialized backend systems that power their massive technological ecosystem.

What Facebook does

Facebook operates the world's largest social networking platform, connecting billions of users globally. The company manages an immense technological ecosystem that must efficiently process, store, and transmit vast amounts of data daily. Beyond its flagship platform, Facebook oversees additional social applications including Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger, all requiring robust backend systems to maintain performance at scale. Given this massive infrastructure, Facebook constantly seeks technologies that can handle concurrent operations efficiently while maintaining simplicity.

How Facebook uses Golang

Facebook's engineering teams utilize Go primarily for infrastructure services and microservices, taking advantage of its goroutines to handle multiple tasks simultaneously. The language powers many of their networking tools and services, utilizing its robust standard library for networked applications. Facebook also employs Go for data processing and analytics tasks, efficiently managing large volumes of information.

The company's most notable contribution to the Go ecosystem came through Ent, a Go entity framework originally developed by Ariel Mashraki while on Facebook's Connectivity team. This object-relational mapping tool was designed specifically to handle mapping complex network topologies when standard solutions proved insufficient. Facebook later open-sourced Ent and moved it to the Linux Foundation in 2023, providing it a vendor-neutral home for future development.

Benefits Facebook gained from Golang

Go's performance characteristics proved ideal for applications where speed and resource efficiency are crucial. The language's compilation to a single binary simplified deployment and distribution of command-line tools for various internal tasks. Most importantly, Go's concurrency model allowed Facebook's developers to handle multiple tasks simultaneously, making it well-suited for high-performance applications requiring efficient resource utilization across massive datasets.

Facebook's experience demonstrates how even the most established technology companies can find value in Go's approach to handling concurrent operations at scale.

Capital One

Traditional banks face a unique challenge when adopting new technologies—they must balance innovation with the rigid compliance requirements that govern financial services. Capital One stands as a compelling example of how established financial institutions can successfully embrace Golang while meeting these demanding standards.

What Capital One does

Capital One operates as America's sixth-largest bank, serving millions of customers through comprehensive banking, credit card, and loan services. The company runs approximately 755 branches from its McLean, Virginia headquarters. What sets Capital One apart is its tech-driven approach to banking—the organization has consistently invested in technology to create more direct, efficient customer engagement across various financial service channels.

The scale of their operations is substantial. As of 2016, Capital One ranked as the fifth-largest credit card issuer by purchase volume, trailing only American Express, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, and Citigroup.

How Capital One uses Golang

Capital One's journey with Go began modestly in 2016 with a single endpoint for their Credit Offers API that acknowledged when offers were displayed to customers. Their existing system relied on Java, but the initial proof-of-concept testing revealed impressive performance improvements that caught the attention of their engineering teams.

This success prompted Capital One to expand Go implementation throughout their infrastructure. Currently, the company employs Golang for:

• Their Credit Offers API - completely rebuilt from Java to Go (version 3.0), now fully serverless

• Platforms handling provisioning and management of resources on public cloud services

• Command line interfaces supporting MacOS and Windows clients

• Transitioning from hierarchical, sequence-based workflows to flatter microservice architectures

The migration represented a significant architectural shift for an organization with decades of Java-based systems.

Benefits Capital One gained from Golang

The results of Capital One's Go adoption exceeded their initial expectations. The company achieved a 70% performance gain in request-to-reply response times. More remarkable was the infrastructure cost reduction—by removing traditional components like EC2, ELB, and RDS, the organization realized 90% cost savings.

Team velocity increased by approximately 30% as developers could focus on creating business-oriented features rather than managing server infrastructure. This shift proved particularly valuable for a financial services company where regulatory compliance and feature development must move in lockstep.

The development team gained flexibility to innovate while supporting expanded functionality for APIs and improving integration with Capital One's continuous integration/continuous delivery pipelines. For a bank operating under strict regulatory oversight, this agility represents a competitive advantage that many traditional financial institutions struggle to achieve.

Cloudflare

Web infrastructure giant Cloudflare demonstrates how companies can harness Golang to manage truly massive network operations at global scale.

What Cloudflare does

Cloudflare operates at the intersection of web security and performance optimization, processing millions of requests per second through DDoS mitigation services while maintaining real-time network performance. The company's infrastructure has become essential to the modern internet, handling substantial portions of global web traffic through its content delivery network services.

The scale of Cloudflare's operations reveals the complexity of their technical challenges. Over half of all dynamic traffic flowing through their network relates to API requests, positioning them as a critical backbone for web applications worldwide. This responsibility demands infrastructure that can scale instantly while maintaining reliability across distributed edge computing systems.

How Cloudflare uses Golang

Golang ranks among Cloudflare's primary programming languages. The company has developed several major systems using Go, each addressing specific aspects of their infrastructure needs:

• RRDNS - A DNS proxy that scales Cloudflare's DNS infrastructure through response rate limiting, caching, load balancing, and CNAME flattening

• Railgun - Compression technology that accelerates connections between Cloudflare's data centers and origin web servers, particularly valuable for high-latency connections

• Red October - A cryptographically secure implementation of two-man rule control mechanisms for encryption and decryption operations

• SSL Bundler - A system that computes optimal certificate chains for customer SSL certificates

These implementations showcase Go's versatility across different aspects of network infrastructure, from DNS resolution to security protocols.

Benefits Cloudflare gained from Golang

Cloudflare's Go implementations have delivered measurable infrastructure improvements. Their recent adoption of Profile-Guided Optimization (PGO) in Go reduced CPU usage by approximately 3.5%, saving roughly 97 cores across their infrastructure. This optimization demonstrates how language-level improvements can translate directly into operational cost savings at scale.

Go's lightweight concurrency model proves crucial for Cloudflare's services, ensuring minimal downtime across their critical infrastructure. The practical impact extends beyond internal operations—Cloudflare's 2024 API Client Language Popularity report shows Go has become the preferred choice for building automated API clients, accounting for around 12% of all automated API requests.

This widespread adoption by developers using Cloudflare's services validates the efficiency and reliability the company has experienced with their own Golang implementations.

Cockroach Labs

Database technology company Cockroach Labs made a bold architectural decision early in their development process, choosing to build almost their entire distributed SQL database on Golang.

What Cockroach Labs does

Cockroach Labs develops CockroachDB, a distributed SQL database designed for mission-critical applications requiring constant availability. Founded in 2015, the company recently celebrated its 10th anniversary, marking a decade of building database technology that combines resilience, scalability, and simplicity. Their client roster includes Bose, Form3, Hard Rock Digital, and Shipt, alongside Fortune 50 financial institutions and major retail and media companies. The core challenge they address is enabling businesses to run applications that maintain availability despite infrastructure failures—a requirement that demands zero downtime tolerance.

How Cockroach Labs uses Golang

The company faced a critical language decision in early 2014, choosing Go over established alternatives like C++ and Java, well before Rust had reached stability. Remarkably, every developer on the project—including the founders—was new to Go at the time. Today, CockroachDB's codebase reflects this commitment: 89.6% is written in Go, with smaller components in Java, C++, Python, TypeScript, Starlark, and Yacc. This represents substantial growth from an empty GitHub repository to over 125,000 lines of non-generated Go code in the early years. The project has attracted more than 600 GitHub contributors as of October 2023, demonstrating how accessible Go remains even for developers without prior experience in the language.

Benefits Cockroach Labs gained from Golang

Go's approach to software engineering proved ideal for database development. The language's simplicity and consistency accelerated onboarding for new developers, while Go's enforced code style, straightforward imports, automated import management, and minimal programming idioms delivered substantial productivity improvements. Unlike Java's emphasis on object-oriented abstractions, Go allowed the team to focus directly on implementation, adding interfaces only when necessary. Compared to C++, automatic memory management eliminated common error sources.

Initially, the team worried about Go's garbage collection impacting database performance. However, they discovered they could implement manual tweaks to control what ends up on the garbage heap, ultimately achieving performance comparable to C++ while maintaining cleaner, more understandable code.

MercadoLibre

What happens when a company realizes their technology stack can't keep pace with explosive growth? MercadoLibre faced exactly this challenge as Latin America's e-commerce leader.

What MercadoLibre does

MercadoLibre operates the largest online commerce ecosystem across Latin America, currently maintaining presence in 18 countries. Founded in 1999 and headquartered in Argentina, the company offers comprehensive ecommerce solutions enabling individuals and businesses to buy, sell, pay, advertise, and ship products through the internet. The scale is staggering—over 900 million requests per minute while managing more than 10,000 daily deployments across approximately 120,000 Amazon EC2 instances.

How MercadoLibre uses Golang

The company's journey with Go began out of necessity rather than choice. Originally, MercadoLibre built its platform on Groovy and Grails with relational databases. However, by 2015, these technologies were reaching their limits as user growth accelerated. The strategic migration to Golang now powers roughly half of the company's traffic.

Their core API team employs Go to build and maintain critical services at the center of their microservices ecosystem. These APIs support multiple platforms including MercadoLibre Marketplace, MercadoPago FinTech, and shipping/logistics solutions. Their largest APIs now process more than 20 million requests per minute.

Benefits MercadoLibre gained from Golang

The transformation delivered results that seem almost too good to be true. Request processing dropped from one minute to just 10 milliseconds. MercadoLibre reduced server requirements from 32 servers to four while simultaneously cutting CPU cores per server in half. This represented an 88% reduction in server count plus 50% less CPU usage per remaining server.

Developer productivity improvements were equally dramatic. Build times became three times faster, and test suite execution accelerated from 90 seconds to merely 3 seconds—24 times faster. Engineering Manager Eric Kohan captured their experience perfectly: "Go was just marvelous for us. It's very powerful and very easy to learn, and with backend infrastructure, has been great in terms of scalability".

Riot Games

Game development powerhouse Riot Games demonstrates how entertainment companies harness Golang to support millions of concurrent players across globally-distributed gaming platforms.

What Riot Games does

Riot Games develops and operates some of the world's most demanding online multiplayer games. League of Legends and Valorant require sophisticated matchmaking systems alongside real-time game servers that support millions of concurrent players worldwide. The company's technical infrastructure faces unique pressures—maintaining consistent performance across global regions while handling enormous player bases that can surge unpredictably during major tournaments or content releases.

How Riot Games uses Golang

Go enjoys "first-class citizen" status at Riot, standing alongside Java as a primary language for services. The Riot Developer Experience (RDX) team employs Go extensively to accelerate how game teams develop, deploy, and operate backend microservices at global scale. Their implementation spans critical systems including global deployment tools, access control management layers, and cloud infrastructure provisioner services managing AWS resources.

Valorant's entire backend microservice architecture runs on Golang—from spinning up and managing game server processes to handling in-game purchases. This comprehensive adoption reflects Go's suitability for the real-time, high-concurrency demands of modern gaming infrastructure.

Benefits Riot Games gained from Golang

Go's parallelization and concurrency primitives through goroutines and channels enable Riot to handle player connections efficiently. The language's simplicity and small specification make onboarding new engineers remarkably straightforward, regardless of their programming background.

Aaron Torres, engineering manager at Riot, values Go's distribution simplicity—applications deploy by simply downloading and running a binary, perfect for command-line tools. Go's built-in concurrency support allows Riot to implement back pressure during slowdowns, parallelize independent operations, and run background processes within applications. These capabilities prove essential when managing the complex, real-time interactions that define competitive gaming experiences.

Salesforce

Enterprise software migrations rarely make headlines, but Salesforce's transition to Golang tells a compelling story about practical engineering decisions at scale.

What Salesforce does

Salesforce stands as the world's #1 AI CRM, helping organizations of any size reimagine their business through AI-powered solutions. The company provides unified data platforms from various sources alongside comprehensive Customer 360 applications. Their flagship product enables organizations to manage customer relationships efficiently while delivering insights through sophisticated analytics tools. Salesforce leadership remains on the cutting edge of emerging technologies, bringing expertise from market analysis and customer conversations to help businesses anticipate future trends.

How Salesforce uses Golang

Einstein Analytics launched in 2017 as a visualization tool that provides insights into all activities occurring within a Salesforce environment. The original architecture used a hybrid approach—C for performance and Python for functionality like query parsing and REST API servers. This seemed reasonable until the product started growing.

Performance bottlenecks emerged as unwanted new features loaded onto the Python wrapper. Einstein Analytics began experiencing slowdowns before launch, creating a critical problem for an enterprise product. Salesforce made the strategic decision to migrate Einstein Analytics from its Python-C hybrid to Golang. Principal Architect Guillaume Le Stum led this transition, rebuilding almost the entire backend in Go.

Benefits Salesforce gained from Golang

Go effectively addressed Python's limitations with multi-threading—a critical requirement for enterprise-scale applications. The language's static typing provided greater reliability compared to Python's loose typing, which became problematic for applications customers were paying millions of dollars for.

Salesforce avoided what they termed a "vast dependency nightmare" that would have occurred with Python's library management. Go's cross-platform capabilities provided unexpected flexibility—as Le Stum noted, "If we ever need any of this code in a mobile app, we can cross-compile it to iOS or Android and it will just work".

Perhaps most telling for enterprise software development: developers at Salesforce appreciate Go's readability over Python's elegance, recognizing that in enterprise software, engineers spend more time reading code than writing it. This practical consideration reflects the reality of maintaining large-scale business applications where clarity trumps cleverness.

Comparison Table

The patterns emerging from these seventeen companies reveal compelling insights about Go's practical impact across different industries. While each organization's journey with Golang started from unique challenges, the results demonstrate remarkably consistent themes.

What stands out most dramatically are the resource efficiency gains. MercadoLibre's transformation from one-minute request processing to 10 milliseconds represents the kind of improvement that fundamentally changes user experience. Similarly, Capital One and Monzo both achieved 90% cost savings—numbers that directly impact business sustainability.

The developer productivity improvements tell an equally compelling story. SoundCloud's ability to move from concept to production in under an hour speaks to Go's practical advantages for engineering teams. This isn't just about faster computers; it's about faster innovation cycles.

Interestingly, companies across vastly different sectors—from banking to gaming to streaming—report similar benefits around concurrency handling and system simplicity. This suggests Go's design choices address fundamental challenges in modern software architecture rather than niche problems.

Conclusion

The evidence speaks for itself. Seventeen major companies across different industries have adopted Golang not as an experiment, but as a core component of their technical infrastructure. This adoption pattern reveals something important about where software development is heading.

Performance improvements consistently emerge as the primary driver. MercadoLibre's transformation from one-minute request processing to 10 milliseconds represents the kind of dramatic gains that make business leaders take notice. Similarly, Capital One's 90% cost savings and Uber's elimination of 24,000 CPU cores through optimization demonstrate Go's ability to deliver measurable business value.

What makes these results particularly compelling is their consistency across vastly different use cases. Whether it's Twitch handling millions of concurrent video streams, SendGrid processing hundreds of millions of daily emails, or Monzo managing thousands of banking transactions per second, Go delivers reliable performance at scale.

The simplicity factor proves equally significant. Cockroach Labs found that developers could become productive in Go faster than other languages, while SoundCloud engineers report moving ideas from concept to production in under an hour. This developer efficiency translates directly into faster time-to-market and reduced development costs.

Reliability becomes crucial when examining companies like Cloudflare and Netflix, where downtime carries substantial business consequences. These organizations chose Go specifically because it enables them to build systems that maintain consistent performance under extreme load conditions.

Perhaps most telling is the diversity of these adopters. From financial institutions requiring maximum security to gaming companies managing real-time player interactions, Go has proven adaptable to widely different technical requirements. This versatility suggests the language addresses fundamental challenges in modern software development rather than solving narrow, specialized problems.

Go's relatively short history makes these adoption patterns even more remarkable. The language has achieved in roughly fifteen years what took other programming languages decades to accomplish. These seventeen companies represent just the beginning of a broader shift toward simpler, more efficient approaches to building scalable software systems.