Go is a newer-generation (2009) multi-purpose programming language developed by Google to address the challenges of software-development at-scale and concurrent programming.
The most well-known projects written in Go are Docker and Kubernetes, but many other essential cloud-native tools are also written in Go, including Terraform and influxdb.
Though most cloud providers provide Go SDKs, in general the Go ecosystem is minimal. One of the reasons for this is that Go's standard libraries (e.g. net/http) are more than sufficient for most use-cases. That said, there's no killer, batteries-included server framework like Express, Rails, or Django that provides a seamless developer experience. So, if your developing a standard, relatively simple API server, I wouldn't use Go unless you have a good reason to (such as concurrency/performance considerations).
That said, Go hits a sweet-spot where Python used to rule: writing CLI applications. I've used Python for this before because:
- it just helps get things done.
- batteries are included. Either the standard Python libraries are enough, or there were plenty of well-vetted, quality libraries to help.
- it's readable.
- a lot of people know it.
Go hits all these marks, but it adds a few killer features. For one, It's typed, which catches a lot of errors before run-time. Go's typing strikes a lovely balance between safety and staying out of your way.
Secondly, it compiles to a binary, allowing you to distribute an executable and not worry about a run-time.
Thirdly, it has first-class asynchronous types (channels) which can massively ease asynchronous network development.
And finally, in some ways, it's even simpler than Python. It's not a sexy, or expressive language at all. There's usually one (simple) way to do things. For example, there are no exceptions. Functions that can fail, by convention, return a two-member tuple, with the last one being an error. The compiler will warn you if don't handle both values returned by such functions.
There is no ternary operator, no generics, nor classical inheritance. The simpler constructs and syntax allows you to fall into the pit of success. You'll have to do it the "Go way," or use some other language. This is by design. With Go, you won't impress the world with clever one-liners. But in a month, when you (or someone else) re-reads your code, the lack of "cleverness" will likely prove to be a very good thing.
Especially for CLIs that you suspect will stay around for a while, and where dirty shell scripts won't cut it, Go offers a perfect balance: portability, speed, and compile-time checks, yet it allows you to get things done--quickly.