Lex Melnykow Head of Web

• Business
• Development Process

June 3, 2022 8 min read

Video Streaming App Building: Why Go is Meant for It

Today, video streaming apps market size is valued at 372.07 billion USD, and by 2029th it is expected to grow up to 1.690.35 billion USD. Users prefer videos to many other kinds of content as it helps to learn a lot of information in a short period of time without any effort: for most of us it’s a rather more attractive idea to watch a film or show than to read the same things in a text document without visualization. 

Before developing a streaming app, it’s important to find out what technologies are the best match for this purpose and why. To help you do it, the Surf team wrote this article. Our specialists with 12 years’ experience in mobile apps, web, and backend development describe challenges typical for video streaming apps building, and explain why Go is meant for it.

Challenges in building web streaming apps

Constantly growing number of users 

requiring high scalability 

When a video streaming platform is expanding, the number of users is increasing. A programming language can solve problems related to high loads. 

If a language you use isn’t scalable, developers will spend too much time trying to implement all the changes and avoid any risks to a product. They will waste time on searching for best solutions, implementing, and testing them as well—and that’s not all. To prevent this problem, it’s better to think in advance, how to make the system perform efficiently and fast regardless of the number of users. And discuss it with your developers or Go development team you hire. 

High availability is a must

for the service not to fail

To reach this purpose, businesses should pay attention to tooling and infrastructure. On the one hand, these are orchestrators and the correct topology, on the other hand, the correct configuration and services setups. Additionally, we have the programming language’s characteristics and excellent error processing.

Programming language’s simplicity is also important in this regard. Thanks to this advantage, developers are less likely to make mistakes and more likely to detect them during the code review. It is extremely important in high loaded systems with thousands simultaneous users, and it helps provide a great user experience—without making the audience wait to load one more video. 

Streaming data in real-time mode

and special requirements to backend 

Stream proceeding is a complicated task: it consists of data cleaning, query processing, stream-stream join, stream-disk join, data transformation, etc. At the same time, there are many technologies created to reduce the difficulties developers meet—stream-stream join algorithms, streaming processing framework, distributed join processing, sensor networks, object tracking and monitoring. 

A programming language can bring a significant contribution to a streaming platform building. For example, if the language has goroutines or green threads at least, the system starts to slow down much later than without them. As a result, we win in resources and money. And when we have a big platform, we win big money.

As a large developer team working on numerous projects, at Surf we have already met all the challenges in streaming platform development. However, it didn’t stop us from launching a Youtube-like app for 3 months. Powerful backend able to process twice as large requests than was planned, CDN for fast load, easy-to-use admin web interface to download videos and watch statistics, and up-to-date mobile app became results we are really proud of. Read our case studies to learn more about the project. 

9 reasons to choose Go for video streaming app building

You can choose different technologies to build a video streaming platform. For example, at Surf we use Java, Kotlin, and Golang for backend development: the choice depends on the specific nature of the project. In this article we’ll focus on the advantages of Go for video streaming apps.

Scalability 

One of the features that makes Go a perfect match for large projects is scalability. Thanks to goroutines, a more lightweight and cheap alternative to green threads, concurrency is easy to provide. In Go-powered apps numerous goroutines are runned simultaneously, and the final results stay the same as we could have using green threads.  

Building a streaming app, developers prefer languages providing easy scalability: as the number of users is constantly growing, it’s important to expand a platform without any failure or malfunction risks. 

Simplicity 

Golang has easy syntax and few keywords. Due to these characteristics, the code is easy to read and support—a developer can understand it even several years later. Besides, developers focus on IT solutions to apply, not on the language specific itself. There is no sense in “code fighting” to create something large and complicated—as video streaming platforms are. 

Moreover, Go was designed  mostly because companies needed an easier alternative to C: powerful and functional like it, but requiring less time to develop. One more point to Go’s simplicity is that developers, who have written in other languages for a long time, can master it in several weeks—and start writing quality code in no time. So, businesses have results after minimal spendings on their IT specialists training. 

Maintainability 

Clear and easy-readable code is a benefit of Go, and due to these characteristics, we get high maintainability. It means that all the changes are introduced with low risk for the whole program. In addition, if a developer leaves your project, the new one, who comes to their place, can understand how a program works fast enough and maintain it without any problems. There is no need for a long-lasting onboarding process as it usually happens with more complicated programming languages. 

As a result, building a streaming app with Go, business saves much time, money, and nerves, and reduces risks related to the bus  factor. Of course, your developers or Go development team you hire should know best Go practices to write initially clear and maintainable code in this language—it’s a key to success. 

Powerful memory management 

Resource utilization in Go is very efficient. Due to its garbage collectors, high compilation speed, and goroutines which take less machine resources than traditional “green threads”, Go provides for effective memory management and, as a result, for better performance. So, a business gets a smooth running application much faster than using many other languages.  

Early bug detection

Any defects and bugs are critical to detect as early as possible—they have a great impact on a project and user experience. How fast and easy it is to find them, largely depends on programming language features. Golang is a statically typed language: it means that variables are known at compile time, so bugs can be detected at the very early stage.

To say some words about dynamically typed languages, for example, PHP, Ruby, Python, and JavaScript, they do not offer such effective bug detection. So, bugs become inevitable, developers have to do extra tests, and business wastes resources.  

High execution speed

As Golang is a compiled programming language, its compiler translates any program into a low-level language immediately, and the processor understands it fast, executing without extra tools and conditions. In video streaming platform development, it’s a very important benefit of Go: the higher execution speed is, the better user experience is. Especially when we have a large-scale project that is constantly expanding. 

Microservices friendly  

Due to its scalability, sustainability, and flexibility, microservice architecture becomes a great solution for web streaming apps building. Go, in its turn, is unrivaled for microservices development. Here are some reasons:

• simplicity of code written in Go compensates complexity typical for microservices,
• CPU and memory use optimization in Go leads to lower resource consumption,
• Go tools provide stronger data security that is critical for microservices,
• Go offers a large choice of toolkits created specially for microservices. 

To learn more about reasons to choose Go for microservices, read Surf’s article. 

Rich toolset 

There are hundreds of libraries, frameworks, databases, and other extra tools available for Go developers. Thanks to them, specialists spend less time creating programs. When they have ready-to-use solutions, processes advance fast, so business saves time and money. In addition, the Go community is developing day by day: thanks to their work, we get more and more tools to have a dreamlike toolset—and provide IT specialists with freedom in developing and launching top quality programs in the easiest way.  

Security 

The Go community pays much attention to security and tools that provide it for Go developers. For example, they have already created special modules and proxies, so keeping data safe is not a problem. Besides, famous orchestrator tools—Kubernetes and Docker—are developed in Go, and they provide extra security to various programs. 

For example, microservices, perfectly matching for video streaming platforms development, are often runned and deployed with the tools. It helps reach higher security. 

To sum up

1. Video streaming platforms are complicated to develop, but they help businesses attract and retain millions of users in a short period of time, and get stable and high income.
2. There are three main challenges developers meet while building video streaming platforms: constantly growing number of users, high availability as a must, and streaming data in real-time mode.
3. To help developers solve the problems and create powerful video streaming platforms, a programming language should be scalable and easy-to-read. High performance, concurrency, maintainability, and security are also important features.
4. Go is best for streaming apps, because it has all the features. Moreover, it’s a great choice for microservices architecture building and has numerous toolkits for various tasks.  

At Surf, our developers have proven experience in video streaming apps building. We’ve been helping companies get powerful results for 12 years and know everything about features most loved by users.