Most Go services look fine in development and die in production. I've seen it dozens of times.

The problem isn't Go — it's that developers skip the distributed systems fundamentals and jump straight to deploying containers.

Here are the 3 most common failure modes I see in production Go services:

1. No backpressure handling

Your service accepts every request until it OOMs. The fix isn't just context.WithTimeout — you need proper load shedding:

func LoadShedder(maxConcurrent int) func(http.Handler) http.Handler {
    sem := make(chan struct{}, maxConcurrent)
    return func(next http.Handler) http.Handler {
        return http.HandlerFunc(func(w http.ResponseWriter, r *http.Request) {
            select {
            case sem <- struct{}{}:
                defer func() { <-sem }()
                next.ServeHTTP(w, r)
            default:
                w.WriteHeader(http.StatusServiceUnavailable)
                w.Write([]byte("server at capacity"))
            }
        })
    }
}

Simple. Effective. Most teams don't add this until after their first outage.

2. Naive retry logic

Retrying failed requests without exponential backoff and jitter creates thundering herds that cascade across your entire system. Every retry multiplies load on an already struggling service.

3. No circuit breaking

When a downstream dependency dies, your service should fail fast — not hang on every request waiting for a timeout. A circuit breaker trips after N failures and short-circuits requests until the dependency recovers.

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These aren't edge cases. They're the basics of building systems that actually stay up.

I built a full course covering all of this — from the fundamentals (CAP theorem, consensus protocols, replication strategies) to production patterns (service mesh, distributed tracing, chaos engineering). Every lesson has runnable Go code.

If you're serious about building backend systems that scale, this is the course.