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Giving your Go apps Tigris superpowers

Xe Iaso · · 6 min read
Xe Iaso
Xe Iaso
Senior Cloud Whisperer
A neon blue tiger walks down a city street at dusk, with skyscrapers and a crescent moon in the background

If you use Go for your web services and want to take advantage of Tigris' advanced features like bucket forking, snapshots, and object renaming, normally your code has to look like this:

func WithRename() func(*s3.Options) {
	return func(options *s3.Options) {
		options.APIOptions = append(options.APIOptions, http.AddHeaderValue("X-Tigris-Rename", "true"))
	}
}

// rename the object in the bucket
_, err = client.CopyObject(ctx, &s3.CopyObjectInput{
  Bucket:     aws.String(bucketName),
  CopySource: aws.String(bucketName + "/" + keyName),
  Key:        aws.String(targetName),
}, WithRename())
if err != nil {
  log.Fatalf("Unable to rename object. Here's why: %v", err)
}

With the new SDK, it looks like this:

_, err := client.RenameObject(ctx, &s3.CopyObjectInput{
	Bucket:     aws.String(bucketName),
	CopySource: aws.String(bucketName + "/" + keyName),
	Key:        aws.String(targetName),
})
if err != nil {
	log.Fatalf("Unable to rename object. Here's why: %v", err)
}

The Go Storage SDK fixes this. It gives you dedicated methods for Tigris features, in two modes:

If you want to get started with it today, go get it:

go get github.com/tigrisdata/storage-go@latest

An SDK so nice we did it twice​

One of the best ways to think about Tigris is that it's like S3, but more. Tigris handles global replication for you. Tigris handles migrating your data for you. Tigris also lets you snapshot, fork, and download bundles of objects all at once. These operations extend S3, so the SDK extends the S3 client. Here's what you get:

As Tigris gets more features, we plan to just add more methods.

This mode is designed to be a drop-in replacement for your existing S3 client to make migration trivial. When I moved some of my own projects over from the AWS S3 library to package storage, it took about 30 seconds at most. Everything compiled normally, everything worked as expected, and I got access to the extra features I needed. Win/win/win!

But wait, there's more​

Honestly, we could have stopped there, but we didn't. Alongside this I also added package simplestorage: a brand new interface to object storage. Most of the time your apps end up using a single bucket. Why should you have to pass the bucket name every time you do anything? Take a gander at how easy it is to copy a file from Tigris to your local filesystem:

client, err := simplestorage.New(ctx)
if err != nil { panic(err) }

obj, err := client.Get(ctx, "my/key")
if err != nil { panic(err) }
defer obj.Body.Close()

slog.Info(
  "object metadata",
  "key", "my/key",
  "size", obj.Size,
  "content-type", obj.ContentType,
)

fout, err := os.Create("./var/object-data")
if err != nil { panic(err) }
defer fout.Close()

io.Copy(fout, obj.Body)

The bucket name and credentials were inferred from environment variables:

  • TIGRIS_STORAGE_BUCKET: The default bucket to operate on.
  • TIGRIS_STORAGE_ACCESS_KEY_ID: The access key ID for your app's keypair.
  • TIGRIS_STORAGE_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY: The secret access key for your app's keypair.

If you don't want to change the environment variable names, simplestorage will use the standard AWS configuration resolution flow you're already used to.

Forked buckets work with the For method:

newBucket, err := client.ForkBucket("my-bucket", "my-agents-bucket")
if err != nil { panic(err) }

newBucketClient := client.For(newBucket.Name)

// do whatever you want here

The main innovation here is reducing cognitive load so that you can focus on what you're doing with your buckets instead of plumbing the minutiae of your object storage API being automatically generated from Java classes. There's also nothing stopping you from using this with AWS S3 or another object storage provider like Hetzner object storage:

s3Client, err := simplestorage.New(ctx,
  simplestorage.WithRegion("fsn1"),
  simplestorage.WithEndpoint("https://fsn1.your-objectstorage.com"),
  simplestorage.WithAccessKeypair(accessKeyID, secretAccessKey),
)
if err != nil { panic(err) }

Advanced Tigris features like bucket forking will not work (Hetzner doesn't implement our extensions to the S3 API), but basic object manipulation will work just fine.

Note that any object manipulation functions will use the client's default bucket, but any bucket manipulation functions require you to spell out the bucket's name just to be sure you're operating on the right bucket.

Get go-ing today​

If you want to try this out, install it in your Go project with go get:

go get github.com/tigrisdata/storage-go@latest

Please give us feedback in the storage-go repo. We want to make this the best way to use Tigris for Go developers and your feedback can only make it better.

Ready to supercharge your Go apps?

The Go Storage SDK gives you first-class access to bucket forking, snapshots, and more — with less boilerplate than raw S3 calls.