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Go · Article15 min read

Where Is Go Used? Companies, Industries and Use Cases (2026)

Where is Go used? Cloud infrastructure, backend APIs, banking, databases and CLIs. See which companies run Go in 2026 and where it is not the usual pick.

Patrik Nilsson
Founder, LevelUpGo
Published September 23, 2026
Where Is Go Used? Companies, Industries and Use Cases (2026)

Go (often called Golang) is used mostly for backend services, cloud infrastructure and command-line tools. Kubernetes, Docker, Terraform and Prometheus are written in Go. So were about 2,100 services at Uber by 2022, and so are all of Monzo's 2,800 banking microservices. Go also runs databases like CockroachDB and Vitess, proxies like Caddy and Traefik, local AI runtimes like Ollama, and since July 2026 the TypeScript compiler. It is rarely the first choice for machine learning training, desktop GUIs or game engines.

TL;DR

  • API services and CLIs are the core. 75% of Go developers build API or RPC services and 62% build command-line tools (Go Developer Survey 2024 H2, 2024).
  • Most cloud-native infrastructure is written in Go. By our count, 31 of the 39 CNCF graduated projects have a main repository written primarily in Go, including Kubernetes, Prometheus, etcd, containerd and Istio (CNCF, September 2026).
  • Big companies run it at scale. Uber has about 2,100 Go services (Uber, 2022) and Monzo says all of its 2,800+ services are written in Go (Monzo, 2024).
  • Most Go developers don't work at tech companies. 54% work outside the tech industry (Go Developer Survey 2025, 2026). Financial services is the second largest industry after tech (Go Developer Survey 2024 H2, 2024).
  • Go's share of API traffic is growing. 20% of automated API requests seen by Cloudflare in 2025 came from Go clients, up from 12% in 2024 (Cloudflare Radar, 2025).

What do Go developers actually build?

Mostly network services and the tools around them. The Go team surveys thousands of developers every year, and the top answers have stayed the same.

In the second half of 2024, 75% of respondents said they build API or RPC services and 62% build command-line tools (Go Developer Survey 2024 H2, 2024). The 2025 survey of 5,379 developers found the same two use cases at the top, with 55% building both. It also added a new category: more than a third build cloud infrastructure tooling, and 11% work with ML models, tools or agents (Go Developer Survey 2025, 2026).

Where that code runs is just as consistent:

Deployment targetShare of Go developers (2025)
Linux, including containers96%
AWS46%
Company-owned servers44%
Google Cloud26%
Embedded and IoT8% (up from 2%)

Source: Go Developer Survey 2025.

Outside the Go community, 16.4% of all respondents to the 2025 Stack Overflow survey used Go in the past year (Stack Overflow, 2025). GitHub's 2024 Octoverse ranked Go the third fastest-growing language on the platform, after Python and TypeScript. It tied that growth to "operations and IaC work, particularly around managing cloud-native infrastructure" (GitHub Octoverse, 2024).

Where is Go used in cloud infrastructure?

Go has its strongest hold here. If you have deployed anything to a container platform in the last ten years, most of the tools between your code and the server were written in Go.

  • Kubernetes schedules and runs containers (kubernetes/kubernetes).
  • Docker, through the Moby engine, and containerd build and run the containers (moby/moby, containerd/containerd).
  • etcd stores the cluster state for Kubernetes (etcd-io/etcd).
  • Terraform, Vault and Consul from HashiCorp provision infrastructure, manage secrets and handle service discovery (hashicorp/terraform).
  • Prometheus and Jaeger collect metrics and traces. Grafana's backend is Go as well, with a TypeScript frontend.
  • Helm, Argo CD, Istio, Cilium and cert-manager handle packaging, deployment, service mesh, networking and TLS inside clusters.

The CNCF's graduated projects give a rough measure. In September 2026 we checked the primary language of each project's main repository on GitHub, and 31 of the 39 were Go. Four are written in other languages: Envoy and Falco (C++), Fluentd (Ruby) and TiKV (Rust). The other four, CloudEvents, SPIFFE, TUF and in-toto, are specifications with implementations in several languages (CNCF projects).

Go fits this work for practical reasons. It compiles to a single static binary, so an agent or a CLI ships as one file with no runtime to install. Goroutines make it cheap to watch thousands of resources or connections at once. The standard library covers HTTP, TLS, JSON and cross-compilation, so a controller that runs on both x86 and ARM servers needs very few dependencies.

Which companies use Go for backend services?

Most Go code in production is ordinary backend services: an HTTP or gRPC endpoint that reads a request, talks to a database or another service, and returns JSON. Here is roughly what one looks like with only the standard library:

example.gogo
package main

import (
	"encoding/json"
	"log"
	"net/http"
)

type Order struct {
	ID     string `json:"id"`
	Status string `json:"status"`
}

var orders = map[string]Order{
	"ord_1042": {ID: "ord_1042", Status: "shipped"},
}

func getOrder(w http.ResponseWriter, r *http.Request) {
	order, ok := orders[r.PathValue("id")]
	if !ok {
		http.Error(w, "order not found", http.StatusNotFound)
		return
	}
	w.Header().Set("Content-Type", "application/json")
	if err := json.NewEncoder(w).Encode(order); err != nil {
		log.Printf("encode order %s: %v", order.ID, err)
	}
}

func main() {
	mux := http.NewServeMux()
	mux.HandleFunc("GET /orders/{id}", getOrder)
	log.Fatal(http.ListenAndServe(":8080", mux))
}

There is no framework here. The router supports methods and path parameters, and the server runs every request in its own goroutine. In a real service the map becomes a database call and the handler grows logging and auth middleware, but the shape stays the same. The HTTP & Networking course builds services like this one step at a time.

A few companies have published numbers:

  • Uber had about 2,100 unique Go services and a Go monorepo of around 50 million lines of code by 2022 (Uber Engineering, 2022). Its geofence lookup service, written in Go instead of Node.js, became its highest-QPS service at 170,000 queries per second with a p95 latency under 5 ms (Uber Engineering, 2016).
  • MercadoLibre handles more than 20 million requests per minute in Go. One service went from 32 servers to 4 after the move (go.dev case study, 2019).
  • Twitch ran many of its busiest systems in Go by 2016, including chat, which served more than 500,000 concurrent users per host (Twitch Engineering, 2016).
  • ByteDance writes 70% of its microservices in Go, according to the Go team's case study list (go.dev case studies).
  • Dropbox moved its performance-critical backends from Python to Go, and had about 200,000 lines of Go by 2014 (Dropbox Tech, 2014).
  • Reddit moved its comment backend from a Python monolith to a Go microservice. The p99 latency of the create, update and increment endpoints dropped by half, and the old Python service had spikes of up to 15 seconds. Accounts are also on Go, and posts and subreddits are being migrated (Reddit Engineering, 2025).
  • Lovable, the AI app builder, rewrote its 42,000-line Python backend in Go. It went from 200 servers to 10 instances, deploys went from 15 minutes to 3, and average requests got 12% faster (Lovable, 2025).

Google, the company that created Go, uses it for web indexing, the Chrome Optimization Guide service, Firebase Hosting and site reliability tooling (go.dev).

Is Go used for networking and proxies?

Proxies, load balancers and DNS servers spend their time moving bytes between sockets, and Go's net and crypto/tls packages were built for exactly that.

  • Caddy is a web server with automatic HTTPS (caddyserver/caddy).
  • Traefik is a reverse proxy and ingress controller that configures itself from Docker and Kubernetes (traefik/traefik).
  • CoreDNS is the default DNS server in Kubernetes clusters.
  • Tailscale builds its mesh VPN client and coordination software in Go (tailscale/tailscale).
  • Cloudflare wrote early on that Go was "at the heart of" its services, including its DNS infrastructure, SSL and compression for slow connections (Cloudflare, 2013).

Go shows up on the client side of the network too. Cloudflare's 2025 Radar review found that 20% of automated API requests on its network came from Go-based clients, up from about 12% a year earlier (Cloudflare Radar, 2025). Go had already passed Node.js for the top spot in 2024 (Cloudflare Radar, 2024). That covers bots, SDKs, sync agents and internal services calling each other.

Is Go used in fintech and banking?

Financial services is the second most common industry among Go developers, at 13% of respondents after technology (Go Developer Survey 2024 H2, 2024).

  • Monzo, the UK bank, runs more than 2,800 microservices and says "all of our services are written in Go" (Monzo, 2024).
  • PayPal has more than 100 Go developers and saw CPU usage drop about 10% on services it moved to Go (go.dev case study).
  • American Express benchmarked Go against C++, Java and Node.js for its payments and rewards platforms. Go handled 140,000 requests per second and came second (go.dev case study).
  • Capital One and Curve also appear among the Go team's published case studies (go.dev case studies).

Which databases are written in Go?

Several distributed databases are written in Go, including some of the best known.

  • CockroachDB is a distributed SQL database (cockroachdb/cockroach).
  • TiDB is a MySQL-compatible distributed database (pingcap/tidb).
  • Vitess shards MySQL horizontally. It was built at YouTube and is now a CNCF graduated project (Vitess).
  • etcd is the consistent key-value store behind Kubernetes.

These are coordination-heavy systems. They run consensus protocols, replicate data between nodes and handle many client connections, which is where goroutines and channels help most. The storage engines underneath are sometimes written in lower-level languages. TiDB, for example, stores data in TiKV, which is written in Rust.

Is Go used for CLIs and developer tools?

Go is a common choice for command-line tools because go build produces one binary per platform that users download and run.

  • GitHub CLI (gh) is written in Go (cli/cli).
  • Hugo is one of the most widely used static site generators (gohugoio/hugo).
  • esbuild, the JavaScript bundler used inside many frontend build tools, is written in Go (evanw/esbuild).
  • kubectl, terraform, helm and the docker CLI are all Go.

The biggest recent example is TypeScript. In March 2025 Microsoft announced that it was porting the TypeScript compiler to Go (Microsoft, 2025). TypeScript 7.0 shipped in July 2026 as "a native port of TypeScript built in Go," with full builds 8 to 12 times faster. Building the VS Code codebase got 11.9x faster (Microsoft, 2026). Anyone who upgrades to TypeScript 7 runs a Go program every time they build.

Where does Go fit in AI infrastructure?

Models are trained in Python, but many of the servers, databases and SDKs around them are written in Go.

Most Go developers are not building AI features yet. 78% said they weren't in the 2025 survey (Go Developer Survey 2025, 2026). The work that does exist looks like the rest of Go's work: an HTTP service that calls a model API, streams the result, retries on failure and enforces a timeout.

Where is Go not the usual pick?

There are four areas where teams rarely start with Go.

  • Machine learning training and data science. PyTorch, JAX and the notebook ecosystem live in Python. Go code usually calls a trained model over an API instead of training one.
  • Desktop GUIs. Go has no widely used native GUI toolkit. Most desktop apps are built with platform SDKs, web technologies or C++ frameworks.
  • Game engines. Unity (C#) and Unreal (C++) dominate. Go shows up in game backends instead. Riot Games and Wildlife Studios are both listed as Go users for server-side systems (go.dev case studies).
  • Hard real-time and tiny embedded systems. A garbage collector makes worst-case pause times harder to guarantee. Embedded use is growing, from 2% to 8% of Go developers in a year (Go Developer Survey 2025, 2026), but C, C++ and Rust are still the default there.

Some teams have also moved specific components away from Go. Discord rewrote its Read States service in Rust in 2020 because garbage collection pauses on a very large in-memory cache caused latency spikes. That was on Go 1.9, and the collector has improved a lot since (Discord, 2020). InfluxData built InfluxDB 1.x and 2.x in Go, then rebuilt the core of InfluxDB 3 in Rust (InfluxData, 2025). For a detailed comparison, see Go vs Rust in 2026.

Which jobs use Go?

Go jobs follow the use cases above. Most of them are backend, platform and infrastructure roles: building APIs, running Kubernetes, writing internal tools and operating data systems.

They are spread across many industries. In the 2025 survey, 54% of Go developers worked outside the tech industry, and 30% worked at companies with more than 1,000 employees (Go Developer Survey 2025, 2026). Banks, retailers, logistics companies and media companies all run Go services. JetBrains estimates that 2.2 million professional developers use Go as their primary language, double the number five years earlier (JetBrains, 2025).

The skills that transfer between these jobs are the ones in the order service above: HTTP handlers, JSON, database access, concurrency with goroutines and context, containers and testing. If you can build and deploy a small service like that, you can read most production Go code. For advice on landing the first role, see How to Get a Software Engineer Job.

Where LevelUpGo fits

LevelUpGo teaches Go through exercises that run real Go code, and the courses target the kind of work described in this post. Start with the free Go Fundamentals track. Then build services in HTTP & Networking, ship them as containers in Docker for Go Developers, and write command-line tools in Building CLI Apps. The roadmap shows the full path, and the Training Ground has standalone exercises for keeping the skills sharp. LevelUpGo's own backend is a Go API of the same kind, built on Gin, GORM and PostgreSQL.

If you are still deciding whether to learn Go at all, Is Go Worth Learning in 2026? covers the decision and US salary data, and Go vs Rust in 2026 compares the two languages most often weighed for backend work.

FAQ

What is Go used for?

Go is mainly used for backend API services, cloud infrastructure and command-line tools. In the Go team's survey, 75% of Go developers build API or RPC services and 62% build CLIs (Go Developer Survey 2024 H2, 2024). Kubernetes, Docker, Terraform and Prometheus are all written in Go.

Which big companies use Go?

Google, Uber, Monzo, PayPal, American Express, Twitch, Dropbox, Reddit, Lovable, Cloudflare, ByteDance, MercadoLibre and Microsoft all use Go in production. Uber had about 2,100 Go services by 2022, and Monzo runs more than 2,800 services, all in Go. Microsoft's TypeScript 7 compiler is written in Go.

Is Go used for web development?

Yes, for the backend. Go is widely used for REST and gRPC APIs, and its standard library net/http package is enough to build a production HTTP server. It is not used for browser frontends. Those are still written in JavaScript or TypeScript.

Is Go used in AI and machine learning?

Go is used for AI infrastructure, not model training. Ollama, the Weaviate vector database and much of Milvus are written in Go, and Anthropic, OpenAI and Google publish official Go SDKs. Training and research still happen in Python.

Is Go only used at tech companies?

No. 54% of Go developers work outside the tech industry (Go Developer Survey 2025, 2026), and financial services is the second largest industry among them (Go Developer Survey 2024 H2, 2024). Banks like Monzo and Capital One and online retailers like MercadoLibre all run Go in production.

Sources

Write Go like a senior engineer

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