How Go Powers Service Mesh, Tracing, and Microservices in Leading Chinese Tech Companies

On April 13, Qutoutiao partnered with Jikebang Technology to host the first Go Language Tech Salon in Shanghai, focusing on practical engineering applications of Go. Although the event lasted only half a day, the enthusiasm and insights shared far exceeded its duration.

Since its release in 2009, Go has celebrated a decade of growth, thanks to its native concurrency, built‑in garbage collection, high safety, simple syntax, fast compilation, and strong backing, leading many large companies to rebuild their backend infrastructure with Go.

Speakers included three senior architects from leading Chinese internet companies deeply using Go: Xu Peng (Qutoutiao Infrastructure), Liu Kai (Qiniu Cloud Data team), and Cao Guoliang (Bilibili Main Site Technical Center).

Self‑Developed Service Mesh in Qutoutiao

Xu Peng presented "Self‑Developed Service Mesh in Qutoutiao", introducing the evolution of Service Mesh and detailing Qutoutiao’s own implementation, Negri.

Negri’s architecture was illustrated, highlighting six main features:

Language‑agnostic: supports PHP, Go, Java, Nodejs, Python, etc.

Low maintenance cost: avoids high‑cost framework upkeep and DRY‑related failures.

Service registration and discovery without SLB deployment, auto‑detecting node changes.

Service governance including rate limiting, circuit breaking, degradation, tracing, metrics, and error injection.

Graphical UI panel for unified configuration, displaying metrics, traces, logs, and call relationships.

Business‑level support such as ABTest, trace, auth, encryption, and signature verification.

Future plans for Negri include compatibility with the xDS protocol to support Istio as a control plane, integration with Redis, MySQL, Nsq, Kafka for traffic control, and service‑to‑service authorization via AppSecret rules.

Go in Qiniu Full‑Link Tracing

Liu Kai shared "Go in Qiniu Full‑Link Tracing", first explaining the origins of full‑link tracing, OpenTracing, and major industry solutions.

He then detailed Qiniu’s tracing system, covering transmission optimization, service topology, onboarding cost, and visual dashboards.

A live demo showed how to instrument a Go project with Qiniu’s tracing module, illustrating tracer mode, span creation, and data collection.

Go in Bilibili Microservice Governance

Cao Guoliang presented "Go in Bilibili Microservice Governance", first outlining challenges of microservice adoption and introducing the early CP service discovery system ZooKeeper.

He then described Bilibili’s Go‑based discovery framework, highlighting node consistency, self‑protection against network partitions, and client instance change handling.

Load balancing evolution was covered, showing three stages and the latest 3.0 version with performance optimizations.

Finally, he explained the implementation of circuit breaking and rate limiting in Go, reinforcing why Go was chosen for this framework.

Lean Coffee Discussion

The event concluded with a Lean Coffee session where participants chose topics such as Go engineering practices, handling high concurrency, industry applications, and future prospects, leading to lively debates and a “Most Valuable Share” award.

The salon fostered connections among Shanghai’s Go enthusiasts, showcasing cutting‑edge applications and expanding the community’s network.