Hopefully by this point you have a grasp of how to utilize basic cookies and sessions in Go, either through native Go or through the use of a framework, such as Gorilla. We've tried to demonstrate the inner workings of the latter so you're able to build without additional libraries obfuscating the functionality.

We've implemented sessions into our application to enable persistent state between requests. This is the very basis of authentication for the Web. By enabling users and sessions table in our database, we're able to log users in, register a session, and associate that session with the proper user on subsequent requests.

By utilizing flash messages, we made use of a very specific feature that allows transfer of information between two endpoints without enabling an additional request that may look like an error to the user or generate erroneous output. Our flash messages works just once and then expire.

In Chapter 7, Microservices and Communication, we'll look at connecting disparate systems and applications across our existing and new APIs to allow event-based actions to be coordinated between those systems. This will facilitate connecting to other services within the same environment as well as those outside of our application.