#OpenSourceDiscovery - Category leading Golang Open Source projects

Category leading OSS, written in Go

Today, I made a list…

A list of Open Source projects written in Go that beat alternatives in any language¹. These projects are clear winner in their category, considering alternatives in other languages. This is a testament to what Golang and Go community has to offer to developers.

Every Golang developer should be familiar with all these projects but this is not just limited to Golang devs, most of these are also useful to other developers.

So here goes the list of Category Leading Golang Open Source projects:

1. Docker - A platform to build, run, and manage containers on various systems

2. Containerd - Runtime for containers. A key component of Docker Engine

3. Kubernetes - Production-Grade container scheduling and management

4. Terraform - Infrastructure automation to provision and manage resources in any cloud or data center

5. RudderStack - Customer data patform to collect customer data from various applications, websites and SaaS platforms
   I wrote a detailed review about this project 👇🏻

6. Hugo - The world’s fastest framework for building websites

7. Syncthing - Open Source continuous file synchronisation

8. Prometheus - monitoring system and time series database.

9. frp - A fast reverse proxy to help you expose a local server behind a NAT or firewall to the internet

10. fzf - A command-line fuzzy finder

11. act - Run your GitHub Actions locally

12. Gogs - Self-hosted Git service

13. Gitea - Git with a cup of tea! Painless self-hosted all-in-one software development service, including Git hosting, code review, team collaboration, package registry and CI/CD

14. Minio - High Performance Object Storage for AI

15. TiDB - TiDB is an open-source, cloud-native, distributed, MySQL-Compatible database for elastic scale and real-time analytics

16. Photoprism - AI-Powered Photos App for the Decentralized Web
    I wrote a detailed review about this project 👇🏻

17. Gitpod - The developer platform for on-demand cloud development environments to create software faster and more securely

18. faas - Serverless functions made simple

19. nsq - A real-time distributed messaging platform

This list is not exhaustive, so welcome your contributions. Appreciate your suggestions for this new series.

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🗣️ What people say about Category leading Go projects around the web

• Most popular Go Open Source projects that beat alternatives in all other languages, a discussion in Golang subreddit

1. What was my methodology to pick category leading projects?

I tried to be as methodical as possible. It was not a single method but a combination of multiple methods that led to the list you see today. Some of those methods were:

• GitHub research: Filtered projects for min popularity and activeness (forks>100+, gh stars > 2k+, updated in last 2 weeks). Then I started sorting out projects for each category and picked the ones that have the features that the category needs and have edge over others in terms of stability, performance, community adoption, etc.

• Reusing my previous research for #OpenSourceDiscovery: For some categories, I had evaluated projects already during the posts for #OpenSourceDiscovery newsletter so it was easy to pick for those categories.

• Secondary research: For some categories I didn't know much about, I did a quick secondary research about its performance benchmark against the other popular tools in the same category, if there was a clear decision coming from the multiple credible sources in favour of the project, I added that in the list.

• Crowd-sourcing and critical feedback: I have iterated over this list by sharing it in the developer communities and inviting feedback and submission for the new candidates. From this exercise, I removed couple of projects I thought as category leading and added couple of new projects that I didn’t realise earlier to be category leading.

• We just know: There was no research needed for many categories e.g. is there any better solution regarded for container orchestration than Kubernetes?

Why this new series of Category Leading Open Source projects?

You might have known #OpenSourceDiscovery newsletter from the reviews I post about interesting Open Source projects, one at a time. Those posts are useful to discover and evaluate some less-known projects but not so useful for projects that are already popular and widely adopted as the category leader. If I were to write review for each of them, it would be a big “meh” for most of you and a lot of work doing what has already been done by the community over and over.

Putting all those category leading projects as a big list is a better format (I think) as it might quickly remind you one of the project you knew you could use but just forgot in the moment or to discover one of the project that is already category leading but you never had a chance to learn about it. Having said that, I might choose to dedicate a review post for some of these projects, specially the ones which recently became category leader or started a new category altogether.

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