Building High-Performance Data Pipelines with Go.

A practical walkthrough of designing fault-tolerant, low-latency ETL pipelines using Go's concurrency model.

Go's goroutine model makes it ideal for pipeline architectures. Channels provide backpressure naturally — no external queue required for medium-throughput workloads.

1func pipeline(ctx context.Context, in <-chan Record) <-chan Result {
2  out := make(chan Result, 100)
3  go func() {
4    defer close(out)
5    for r := range in {
6      select {
7      case <-ctx.Done():
8        return
9      case out <- process(r):
10      }
11    }
12  }()
13  return out
14}

“Make it work, make it right, make it fast — in that order.”
— Kent Beck

For fan-out patterns, spawn N worker goroutines reading from a shared input channel. The scheduler handles work distribution without explicit load balancing.