Auth Service to Go | Nhost

This is one of those posts about how we migrated X from Y language to Z and all the improvements and amazing things we saw along the way. If you are triggered by this kind of post or you are a fan of Y (or some other language entirely) and are equally triggered, apologies in advance ;)

So let's get started with what we did exactly. In the last couple of months we started migrating our Auth service from Node.js to Go. In order to be able to migrate this bit by bit we followed the strangler fig pattern (more on this later) and at the time of writing this document we have migrated most of the functionality already. Enough to see the benefits and start writing yet-another-I-migrated-from-x-to-y-post.

In programming, the strangler fig pattern or strangler pattern is an architectural pattern that involves wrapping old code [...] One use of this pattern is during software rewrites. Code can be divided into many small sections, wrapped with the strangler fig pattern, then that section of old code can be swapped out with new code before moving on to the next section. This is less risky and more incremental than swapping out the entire piece of software.

Let's see what this actually means. In PR #464 we added to the Auth service a Go process that simply proxied all requests. When a request would come in, it would forward the request to the Node.js process, nothing else:

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