go-zero

go-zero is a Go framework for building microservices — that is, backend systems made up of many small, independently running services that communicate over a network. It was created by a team that migrated a large-scale application from a traditional single-codebase architecture and needed something that could handle tens of millions of daily users reliably without constant manual tuning.

The framework bundles a large collection of production-grade features directly, so developers do not have to assemble them from separate libraries. These include automatic timeout management (cancelling requests that take too long), rate limiting (preventing too many concurrent requests from overwhelming a service), circuit breakers (temporarily stopping calls to a failing dependency so problems do not cascade), and load shedding (gracefully refusing requests when the system is overloaded). All of these protective mechanisms work out of the box with sensible defaults.

One of its standout features is a code generation tool called goctl. You write a simple .api file describing your HTTP endpoints — the URL paths, request parameters, and response shapes — and goctl generates the complete Go server scaffolding from that description. It can also generate client code in iOS Swift, Android Kotlin, TypeScript, JavaScript, and Dart from the same .api file. This dramatically reduces repetitive boilerplate when maintaining APIs across multiple platforms. The framework also includes built-in request parameter validation, so inputs from clients are automatically checked against the rules you specify.

You would reach for go-zero when building a Go backend system with multiple services that need to be resilient and maintainable under high traffic. It fits teams who want a comprehensive, opinionated framework rather than assembling individual components themselves. The stack is pure Go, listed in the CNCF (Cloud Native Computing Foundation) landscape.