As technology evolves, businesses find themselves pushing the boundaries of performance, scalability, and efficiency. For companies like Cloudflare and Curve, migrating from PHP to Go (Golang) was not just a technological leap but a necessity to meet the growing demands of their systems. While PHP has been a solid foundation for many web applications, the changing landscape of modern software architecture and operational needs led these companies to choose Go as their next step.
In this article, we explore the need, process, outcomes, and lessons learned from the migration experiences of Cloudflare and Curve. These stories highlight the compelling reasons why a growing number of companies are making the same shift to Go.
Why Companies are Migrating from PHP to Go
PHP has long been a dominant language for web development due to its simplicity, flexibility, and vast ecosystem. However, as systems grow more complex and demands for performance, scalability, and reliability increase, PHP’s limitations become more apparent. Go, also known as Golang, offers a compelling alternative with its modern features and ability to meet the needs of contemporary applications.
1. The Demand for Better Observability
One of the core requirements of modern systems is observability—the ability to monitor, trace, and log performance across distributed systems. As companies move from monolithic architectures to microservices, observability becomes increasingly critical. The ability to easily spot failures and debug issues is essential for maintaining uptime and reliability.
With PHP, implementing observability in distributed architectures is often cumbersome, involving third-party tools, performance trade-offs, and custom instrumentation. Go, by contrast, is designed with modern software architectures in mind. Its built-in support for concurrency and scalability, combined with a rich ecosystem of tools like Prometheus and OpenTelemetry, makes it easier to build observable systems.
Cloudflare, for example, adopted Go not only for performance reasons but also because of its superior ability to scale and manage large distributed systems. The ease with which Go integrates with observability tooling allowed them to monitor their services more effectively and resolve issues more quickly.
2. Scalability and Performance
Scalability is a key driver for migration. As user bases grow and traffic increases, systems must scale efficiently, both horizontally and vertically. PHP applications often struggle to handle high-concurrency workloads, requiring significant engineering effort to optimize. Go, however, was built from the ground up with scalability in mind.
Go’s goroutines, its lightweight concurrency model, allow applications to handle thousands of tasks simultaneously with minimal overhead. This makes Go an ideal choice for building scalable, high-performance web services. When companies like Curve made the switch to Go, they noticed immediate performance improvements without having to heavily optimize the code. The same systems that struggled under PHP could now handle thousands of requests per second using significantly fewer resources.
This performance improvement is crucial for companies looking to offer responsive services without breaking the bank on infrastructure costs.
3. Developer Productivity and Maintainability
Another significant advantage Go brings is in developer productivity and maintainability. PHP is known for its ease of use, but as projects scale, the complexity of maintaining a PHP codebase can increase dramatically. Especially with complex dependencies, frameworks, and third-party libraries, PHP projects can become difficult to manage.
Go, on the other hand, is designed to be simple and explicit. Its minimal syntax and the use of static typing help developers catch errors early in the development cycle, reducing the chances of runtime issues. Cloudflare and Curve both reported faster onboarding times for new developers with Go. Engineers with no prior Go experience were writing production-ready code within one to two weeks, something rarely seen with PHP.
Go’s philosophy of using fewer external libraries, relying more on the standard library, also helps to maintain clean and lightweight codebases. This reduces the complexity of managing dependencies and ensures that code is easier to maintain over time.
4. Modern Architectural Needs: Microservices and Cloud-Native
As applications evolve, so too do their architectural needs. Moving away from monolithic designs towards microservices or cloud-native architectures requires a language and framework that can support such distributed environments.
Go excels in this regard. Its small memory footprint, fast startup time, and ease of deployment make it ideal for containerization and microservices. For example, Cloudflare, which started with a PHP monolith, gradually moved towards microservices by adopting the Strangler Pattern. In this pattern, companies “strangle” out the legacy system by building new services around the existing system in Go while maintaining some of the original PHP codebase.
This approach allows for a gradual migration, reducing risk and minimizing the impact on business operations. In time, the PHP system becomes smaller, with critical services running in Go, and the company enjoys the best of both worlds: PHP for legacy components and Go for modern, scalable services.
5. Simplicity in Deployment and Containerization
Another challenge in maintaining PHP systems is the complexity of deploying them, particularly in containerized environments. PHP apps often rely on external web servers like Apache or Nginx, along with the interpreter and various dependencies. This adds complexity to deployment pipelines and increases the size of container images.
With Go, deployment becomes much simpler. Go compiles into a single binary, removing the need for external dependencies or an interpreter. This makes it easy to create small, efficient container images that are ideal for cloud-native environments like Kubernetes. In contrast to PHP container images, which can be several gigabytes in size, Go applications can be containerized in as little as 13MB, drastically improving resource efficiency and deployment times.
6. Security and Reliability
Security is another major reason companies are migrating from PHP to Go. PHP’s dynamic nature, while flexible, can introduce security vulnerabilities if not carefully managed. Go’s type safety and strict memory management help mitigate many of the risks that come with PHP, such as buffer overflows and injection attacks.
Additionally, Go’s statically compiled binaries allow companies to ship applications with fewer moving parts, reducing the surface area for potential vulnerabilities. Combined with the language’s focus on simplicity and correctness, this provides a much stronger foundation for building secure applications.
The Process: How Cloudflare and Curve Migrated
Cloudflare’s Migration Story
Cloudflare began as a PHP monolith, but as they scaled, the need for faster, more scalable services became crucial. Their strategy wasn’t to immediately replace everything, but to gradually build new services in Go around the existing PHP infrastructure. This gave them the flexibility to move at a comfortable pace while continuing to meet business needs.
Initially, Cloudflare deployed Go for new services—particularly ones that demanded high performance. They began with internal tools and smaller services to experiment with the new language and understand how to best use Go in their environment. As these Go services proved successful, handling more traffic with lower resource consumption, they continued to migrate more of their systems.
Outcomes:
- Immediate performance gains: Go’s ability to handle thousands of requests per second without heavy infrastructure investments made an immediate impact.
- Enhanced observability: With Go, Cloudflare was able to integrate deeper observability and monitoring tools, giving their engineers better insight into their distributed services.
- Improved developer onboarding: New developers ramped up faster, contributing to production systems in a matter of weeks compared to months with PHP.
Challenges:
- One of the early challenges Cloudflare faced was understanding how to structure their Go projects for scalability. The team learned quickly that while Go is powerful, transitioning to it from PHP required a paradigm shift in how they architect their systems.
- The transition required investing in retraining their engineering teams. Although Go was easy to pick up, developers still needed time to understand how to write idiomatic Go code.
Curve’s Migration Journey
Curve, a fintech startup, followed a similar migration path. As a rapidly growing company, their PHP-based monolithic application started to show performance bottlenecks, especially when handling concurrent transactions and real-time data processing. For a fintech company, performance is non-negotiable, and Go provided the ideal solution.
Curve initially adopted Go for new microservices and components. By building around their existing PHP monolith, they ensured business continuity while testing Go in production. Over time, they shifted core features like transaction processing and customer interactions to Go services.
Outcomes:
- Scalability without effort: Curve’s Go-based services handled high concurrency and performed efficiently at scale, especially for their high-demand financial services.
- Smaller deployment footprint: Go’s statically compiled binaries allowed Curve to deploy microservices with smaller container images, improving both performance and resource usage.
- Developer satisfaction: Developers who joined Curve with no prior Go experience were able to onboard quickly and build robust features within weeks.
Challenges:
- Curve faced data synchronization challenges during the transition. Running both PHP and Go systems in parallel led to inconsistencies between the two environments. However, they mitigated this by careful data modeling and investing in robust messaging systems.
- Like Cloudflare, Curve learned that building a distributed system required thinking beyond just the code. They had to account for failure scenarios, such as network failures and replication lags, which they didn’t encounter as much in a monolithic PHP setup.
Outcomes and Lessons
1. Go Delivers Outstanding Performance
Both Cloudflare and Curve found that Go’s performance was phenomenal, even with minimal optimization. The same systems that struggled with PHP were able to handle thousands of requests per second with Go. For Cloudflare, whose business revolves around handling massive amounts of internet traffic, this performance boost was critical.
2. Simplicity in Deployment
PHP applications typically rely on an interpreter and web server such as Apache or Nginx, making them larger and more complex to deploy. Go’s statically compiled binaries provided a stark contrast. Both companies saw significant benefits in deploying smaller, more efficient containers, which were easier to scale in cloud environments like Kubernetes.
3. Managing Complexity with Observability
Migrating to Go brought with it the need to observe and monitor distributed systems effectively. Both companies benefited from Go’s integration with tools like Prometheus and its ease of adding metrics, tracing, and logging directly into the services. This enabled them to pinpoint issues faster, ensure smoother operations, and understand system behavior in real-time.
4. Overcoming the Learning Curve
While Go is known for its simplicity, both Cloudflare and Curve recognized that adopting a new language and transitioning to a microservices architecture was not without its hurdles. Developers needed time to adapt to Go’s idioms and new ways of structuring projects. However, once they did, they found Go to be a long-term productivity booster.
Conclusion: A Strategic Migration to Go
Migrating from PHP to Go is not just about speed or modern language preferences—it’s about adapting to the new demands of modern applications. Companies like Cloudflare and Curve have shown that Go offers compelling advantages in performance, scalability, observability, and developer productivity. The migration wasn’t without its challenges, but the outcome was clear: Go allowed them to build more resilient, scalable, and maintainable systems that meet the needs of their business today and in the future.
For organizations considering the switch, the stories of Cloudflare and Curve are powerful examples of how embracing Go can drive innovation, efficiency, and sustainable growth.
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