go-plugins

Do not assume "Go Plugin" in this context. We are not using the Go plugin system. Plugin is a name used to describe something that can be "plugged in" or that is "plug and play". In our case as mentioned, we use the Go interface as an abstraction and the "Plugin" is an implementation of that interface which can replace what you're using. You will import plugins for rabbitmq, kafka, etc as a Go import. You can then use env vars and flags to choose which you want to use. Internally we are taking an initialiser for New[Plugin] from a list and executing it to set it up. There is no Go language plugin loading, its all still compiled code. Its just how we use the abstraction. Please see the readme for our plugins for more detail https://github.com/micro/go-plugins

Go Micro is a framework/library as opposed to a binary or server. You import the framework in code and it gives you the ability to add additional plugins via new imports. These can then be swapped out via environment variables or flags. We make use of Go interfaces to define the abstractions so all you have to do is create a plugin that implements the interface and that effectively makes it pluggable. Here's the community led Go Micro plugin effort https://github.com/micro/go-plugins

Fault tolerant in what way? And hot swapping in what way? Go micro uses client side selection and load balancing so you can set number of retries and the timeout period so that it will iterate through nodes for a given request. There's also implementations for rate limiting and circuit breakers as client side wrappers/middleware in the go-plugins repo https://github.com/micro/go-plugins/tree/master/wrapper. Plugins themselves can either be imported and added to a map within the go-micro/cmd package which can be set via flags or env vars or you can set it up yourself and pass it into the client/server. Go does not support DSOs yet so bit difficult to do "hot swapping" in that way if thats what you mean.