System Design for a Go Web App on AWS

A Simple System Design for Go Apps on AWS

Deploying a Go application on AWS doesn’t have to be complex. In this post, we’ll walk through a simplified system design using common AWS services. If you’re building a basic web API or microservice in Go, this is a solid starting point for going from local development to a cloud deployment.

🧠 What Are We Building?

A basic Go web API that:

  • Accepts requests from clients (like browsers or Postman)
  • Reads/writes from a database
  • Optionally uploads files (like a user avatar)

🗺️ High-Level Architecture

  1. Client → DNS (via Route 53)
  2. Route 53 → Load Balancer (ALB)
  3. Load Balancer → Go app running in a container (Fargate)
  4. Go app → Database (RDS)
  5. Go app → Storage (S3)
  6. Secrets and logs managed by Secrets Manager and CloudWatch

🧰 AWS Services Used

  • Route 53 – for managing your domain and routing traffic
  • ACM (Certificate Manager) – to get an HTTPS certificate for secure traffic
  • ALB (Application Load Balancer) – to distribute incoming traffic to your app
  • ECS Fargate – to run your Go app in containers without managing servers
  • Amazon RDS – to store structured data (PostgreSQL or MySQL)
  • Amazon S3 – for storing files like images or PDFs
  • Secrets Manager – for storing credentials (for example., DB passwords)
  • CloudWatch – for logs and basic monitoring

🔐 Basic Security Setup

  • Security Groups – control which services can talk to each other (for example., only the ALB can reach your app; only your app can reach the database)
  • IAM Roles – assign fine-grained permissions (for example., app can read from S3, but not write)

📦 Deployment Flow

  1. You write your Go app and build a Docker container.
  2. Push the container to ECR (Elastic Container Registry).
  3. Deploy it to ECS Fargate, connected to a Load Balancer.
  4. Route DNS traffic to the Load Balancer using Route 53.
  5. Use ACM to secure the site with HTTPS.

💡 Simple Example in Practice

Let’s say a user visits https://myapp.com/upload:

  1. Route 53 resolves the domain.
  2. ALB receives the HTTPS request and forwards it to your app.
  3. Go app handles the request, stores a file in S3, and writes info to RDS.
  4. Response goes back to the user.

All traffic is secure (TLS), and permissions are tightly scoped.

✅ Recap

This setup gives you:

  • A production-ready app stack
  • Scalability with ECS Fargate
  • Secure storage and secrets
  • No servers to manage!

You can build on top of this as your app grows — adding caching, queues, CI/CD, etc.