Ecosystem & Tools

Overview

The Goa ecosystem includes companion libraries that address common needs in microservice development. These tools are designed to work seamlessly with Goa but can also be used independently.

Companion Libraries

Model — Architecture Diagrams as Code

Model provides a Go DSL for describing software architecture using the C4 model. Instead of drawing diagrams in graphical tools, you define your architecture in code:

var _ = Design("My System", "System description", func() {
    var System = SoftwareSystem("My System", "Does something useful")
    
    Person("User", "A user of the system", func() {
        Uses(System, "Uses")
    })
    
    Views(func() {
        SystemContextView(System, "Context", "System context diagram", func() {
            AddAll()
            AutoLayout(RankLeftRight)
        })
    })
})

Benefits:

• Version-controlled architecture documentation
• Automatic diagram generation (SVG, JSON)
• Interactive graphical editor for positioning
• Goa plugin for combined API + architecture designs

Learn more: Model Documentation

Pulse — Distributed Event Infrastructure

Pulse provides primitives for building event-driven distributed systems. It’s transport-agnostic and works with or without Goa services:

• Streaming: Pub/sub event routing across microservices
• Worker Pools: Dedicated workers with consistent hashing for job dispatch
• Replicated Maps: Eventually-consistent shared state across nodes

// Publish events to a stream
stream.Add(ctx, "user.created", userEvent)

// Subscribe to events
reader.Subscribe(ctx, func(event *Event) error {
    return processEvent(event)
})

Use cases:

• Async event processing
• Background job queues
• Distributed caching
• Real-time notifications

Learn more: Pulse Documentation

Clue — Microservice Observability

Clue provides instrumentation for Goa services built on OpenTelemetry. It covers the three pillars of observability:

// Configure OpenTelemetry
cfg := clue.NewConfig(ctx, "myservice", "1.0.0", metricExporter, spanExporter)
clue.ConfigureOpenTelemetry(ctx, cfg)

// Context-based logging
log.Info(ctx, "processing request", log.KV{"user_id", userID})

// Health checks
checker := health.NewChecker(health.NewPinger("db", dbAddr))

Features:

• Distributed tracing with automatic span propagation
• Structured logging with intelligent buffering
• Metrics collection and export
• Health check endpoints
• Debug endpoints for runtime troubleshooting

Learn more: Clue Documentation

Documentation Guides

Total Section: ~7,500 tokens

Getting Started

Choose the library that matches your needs:

• Need architecture documentation? Start with Model
• Building event-driven systems? Start with Pulse
• Adding observability to Goa services? Start with Clue

All libraries are available via go get:

go get goa.design/model
go get goa.design/pulse
go get goa.design/clue